GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 124134
Tool-Options has hidden options due to Tool-Box Size
Last modified: 2004-09-25 14:31:43 UTC
Issue: The format of the Tool-Options being beneath the Tool-Box (the main panel with all the tool-buttons on it, I think it's called the tool-box) makes buttons be invisible quite commonly. Recreating: For a precise example, put the tool-box to five buttons wide (I think that's the default width) then click on the Airbrush tool (or hit A). The options for the Airbrush are wider than the area alotted, and no horizontal scrollbar appears to allow access to them. The only way to view them is to resize the entire tool-box. This is not acceptable both because it is more work than should be required and because it causes (due to more columns being added) the layout of the tools in the tool-box to change, so it takes longer to dig for them. This isn't an issue with every tool, but it is with quite a few. Airbrush is one of the worse examples. This might not happen with every theme, I do not know, but I use a pretty default configuration (out-of-the box on Slackware 9.1). Although this only happens to the Tool-options at the normal configuration, if anything else is added to that box (such as layers) it is also a problem. Fix: A quick fix is to make the tool-options get a horizontal scroll-bar. This would be better than the current situation, but not ideal. The only other option I see is to not have the tool-options be in the same panel as the Tool-box by default. Although I like that configuration, this error makes it unusable.
I would not like to have an additional horizontal scroll bar. That would take even more space on the screen. On the other hand, this may be the easiest workaround for this problem. I have read several comments saying that the GIMP should reduce the spacing between all controls in the various dialogs and should in general try to have dialogs that are as compact as possible (even if this may require custom widgets in some cases). That would be a better solution to your problem, although it would take more time to implement.
This is IMO merely a problem of the default setup. Whatever we do, some tool-options will never fit into the toolbox dock if people prefer a vertical toolbox layout. So we need to decide if we want to ship with a wider default (8 tools in a row) or provide a default setup that doesn't have the tool-options docked with the toobox. I think that adding a horizontal scrollbar would only make things worse but perhaps you are right and it should be added (when needed). That would be a trivial change.
You can already get a more compact GIMP user interface. This could be improved but quite a few sizes are themeable already. The gtkrc file that is installed in the users ~/.gimp-1.3 directory includes a "small" style. You can enable it by uncommenting the following line: # class "GtkWidget" style "gimp-small-style"
*** Bug 124482 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Horizontal scrollbar looks less distracting than I would have expected and it's probably better than having widgets that are not accesible: 2003-10-13 Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> * app/widgets/gimptooloptionseditor.c: set the horizontal scrollbar policy to AUTOMATIC; addresses bug #124134. I suggest we close this report as FIXED and open a new enhancement request for a more compact user interface. This should be postponed to 2.2 then. Hopefully the new option menu in GTK+-2.4 wastes less space than the current one.
Closing as FIXED since we can't do much about that: if the user insists on having tool options in the toolbox, she either has to make it wider or live with that scrollbar.
From: Alexander Rabtchevich <alexander.v.rabtchevich@iaph.bas-net.by> I'm using small theme on Windows, Russian interface. English is one of the "shortest" languages. The same string in English is shorter than in Russian and (as I remember) German is even "fatter". But the problem isn't only in string widths. The problem is in the width of the controls. The problem can be solved by proper formatting and positioning of the controls. Look at the text toolbox (Windows, Russian). All the edit controls are aligned right to the widest control caption. Ok, it looks good. By why on the Earth the colour selector, the shift edit and the line spacing edit are 335 points width each? The units selection control is 125 points width. The font size control is 227 points width. I think it's some mistake. The checkboxes are aligned left to the left position of the edit controls. If they would be aligned to the left of the window along with the narrowing of the edit controls, the window could be 2 times narrower without any changes in GTK.
Thanks for pasting this here, but it doesn't really make sense to add comments to closed bug reports. Also, as has been outlined already, the problem is known and it has also to some extent been addressed in the HEAD branch already.