I added a block against bug 328866 ("Applets don't look right in vertical panel")

1. Making the label vertical would make the applet unreadable, I'm afraid
2. Flags are banned in GNOME - though people can use gswitchit-plugins in order to use flags

So I do not see any real fix here other than making the panel wider or using non-cosher flags.

I'm not so sure making the applet vertical would be such a bad thing. Usually you just need to take a quick glance at it because you only have to distinguish between two or three possible options. It's not like you're trying to read a novel sideways.

The key is that this doesn't involve reading so much as recognizing, and it's much easier to recognize words in situations where reading would be difficult. The alternative is to only show the first two letters of the layout's name, which is entirely useless in some cases, (USA vs USA Dvorak) though it may be acceptable in others.

The clock also behaves this (vertical) way.

The clock is lucky - it can use graphics. I do not know how to represent layouts graphically, without flags;)
I will think about vertical writing - but I have serious doubts I'll ever do it...

I think that making the three-letter layout name appear vertical is not so bad.

The menu bar in Ubuntu 6.06 shows vertically the Applications/Places/System names, in addition to the clock applet.
Technically it should be a few lines code addition to get the text shown vertically (it's rotated with Pango, isn't it?)

OK, I'll check what it looks like...

s/vertical/rotated/g for the text orientation.
I suppose that vertical means something like

U
S
A

while rotated (90 degrees) is what we actually want.

Pango appears to support rotated text,
http://fishsoup.net/blog/2004/11/20/#8

Pango does support - but I think I will not even need it. Just gtk_label_set_angle should do.... BTW, should the angle be 90 or 270 depending on whether the panel is on the left or right side of the screen?

Created attachment 68603 [details]
Taskbar when placed on the left of the desktop

To help view the orientation of the text. 
When opering the Menu Bar, the menu items are listed as normal, horizontally.
I have put green so it is also visible which applets need some more work (hint: SCIM).

Created attachment 68604 [details]
Panel when placed on the right (as in direction) side of the screen.

To help view the orientation of the text. 
When opering the Menu Bar, the menu items are listed as normal, horizontally.
I have put green so it is also visible which applets need some more work (hint: SCIM).

Fixed in CVS

I'm sorry to interrupt, but what exactly does "Fixed in CVS" mean?
Because if it means anything other than "We've added an option to let the user choose his text orientation" I don't consider this fixed at all. Reading text (clock, battstat etc.) which is rotated like this is very hard to read, and should not be forced upon people.

(In reply to comment #12)
> I'm sorry to interrupt, but what exactly does "Fixed in CVS" mean?

"CVS" is the system that GNOME uses to manage the source code while programmers develop it. Speaking of which, GNOME will be upgrading to SVN (an enhanced version) next week. Normally a person would simply say "Fixed", though it sounds nice to say "Fixed in CVS". Also you may find people mention "Fixed in HEAD", which is another way to say that the latest version of the source code (HEAD) has the fix.

> Because if it means anything other than "We've added an option to let the user
> choose his text orientation" I don't consider this fixed at all. Reading text
> (clock, battstat etc.) which is rotated like this is very hard to read, and
> should not be forced upon people.

The other applets automatically rotate their text to the left or the right depending on the location of the panel.

If rotating the text is not sufficient, then a new bug report should be filed against gnome-applets that proposes a better uniform solution.

I know what CVS and SVN are, but thanks for the explanation anyway :)
What I wanted to know was how it was fixed in CVS, I wanted to know if it was made such that there is (for example) an option to specify text alignments, or perhaps a revert to the old behaviour etc.

There is actually a bug report that does discuss several options to this problem: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=328866
I was actually directed to this bug because bug 328866 appears to depend on this one.

As far as I'm concerned, I am really hoping that there will come a configuration option, somewhere, (even if it's hidden in gconf), that will either globally or per-applet set the text rotation. My personal preference would probably be a per-applet basis, because there might be applets that one would want to have rotated text.

I don't know why there aren't a lot more people complaining about this because it is a really silly thing to have a vertical clock! (or battstat applet for that matter) You shouldn't rotate the text on everything 'just because you can', instead you should only use it because it has a definite clear advantage. This bug report probably is such a case. The clock IS NOT.

Also, as I noted in the other bug, if this rotation thing is seriously going to happen, I want you to think about how to handle the case where a panel is on the TOP of the screen, do you render all text and images upside down? Because that would make the text rendering consistent with the rest of the possible panel orientations.

ps.
I know exaggerating a bit about the Top Panel thing, but I think it really is quite an effective counter example that shows why always rotating the text to align with the panel 'bottom' is bad.

Okay, I think there is a bit of confusion here.

First of all, you can see the code change at
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-applets/gswitchit/gswitchit-applet.c?r1=1.66&r2=1.67&sortby=date

The panel that houses the keyboard indicator applet may be placed on one of the four sides of the screen. Depending on which side it is, the caption of the applet will rotate automatically. You can't force the rotation; it's derived from the current position of the panel.

If the panel is on top of the screen, there is no rotation whatsoever happening.

With this bug fix, the keyboard indicator follows the expected behaviour of the rest of the applets. This is good.

If we are to change the orientation of the applets on a per applet basis, this should be discussed in a mailing list, such as usability-list first and not in bugzilla.

You are probably right, it's just when this text-rotating thing first started happening I took it for a bug, and looked at this bugzilla and found that other bugreport that I mentioned. I added 2 comments there (one with the original bug for the clock in 2.12 and another when also the battstat applet in 2.14 began to rotate). I never heard anything from it again so I just ignored it because I was rather busy at the time. But then when I got an email reminding me it sparked my interest again and so here I am :)

>If the panel is on top of the screen, there is no rotation whatsoever
>happening.
I never said there was, I was making a point: Don't do silly rotations unless it's really neccessary! (My example was what would happen if you are prepared to be consistent about it :p)

>With this bug fix, the keyboard indicator follows the expected behaviour of the
>rest of the applets. This is good.
Sorry, but I don't agree. The rotating of the keyboard indicator is 'good' because it resolves a usability issue (You can now actually read what layout is in use in a vertical panel), not because 'the rest of the applets' rotate (at least clock and battstat shouldn't rotate at all for example).

So I guess I'll go find that usability list then ;)