GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 104753
About dialog too big with large font
Last modified: 2011-08-28 22:31:30 UTC
I upgraded GNOME on a box with an old but acceptable monitor (does 1024x768). I opened the About GNOME dialog, and it didn't fit in the window, it was too wide. If it doesn't fit in such resolution, I can't think how it'll look like in 800x600, etc. It should be redesigned someway to make it smaller. I tried building the new about dialog, but it would crash on me.
can we see a screenshot? cheers.
Hey Mark. Ok, I had a look, and the real problem is that this user uses big fonts (size 16, IIRC). Still want a screenshot? Right, 16 isn't a "standard size" for application fonts, but it's not *so* big either. The about dialog could use some redesign.
I'm just looking at some old bugs... I don't know if this is still an issue, but Jordi has responded, so I'm going to reopen for now.
Jordi is this still an issue with the new gnome-about dialog?
I don't know, I use a bigger resolution myself. This is a common problem with GNOME programs, anyway. It seems all of use develop the UI with giant resolutions, and the result is that GNOME is many times unusable on 800x600 or 1024x768, or when a user sets up biggy fonts (bad sight or whatever).
*** Bug 125292 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Apologies for spam-- ensuring Sun a11y team are cc'ed on all current a11y bugs. Filter on "SUN A11Y SPAM" to ignore.
I am not seeing a peroblem with the width of the gnome-about window but there is a problem with the display of the introduction messages in that there is not enough room (height) for them to be displayed without obscuring other text.
gnome-about has been rewritten in python. I think the size is even more reasonable now, but Padraig's last commenet is still somewhat true: with a big font (16), the description is not entirely shown.
Bug fixed in my latest version, see commits http://tinyurl.com/2tkkhy to http://tinyurl.com/2wnojl
Created attachment 99417 [details] [review] Patch
*** Bug 125296 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
That's a good start. Guillaume, some comments (not on the code, but on the results): + the paragraph describing gnome should become wider when the police becomes bigger. It seems the width is constant. + if I launch gnome-about with font size 10, then increase the font size to 15, the height of the window changes with each paragraph of the description, because the height of each paragraph is different. Looks weird. Can probably be fixed if the first issue is fixed. + the first line of the description for most paragraph is cut (I don't see the top of the letters). Can probably be fixed if the second issue is fixed :-) + if I go back to size 10, the height of the window is wrong, until a new paragraph of the description appears. Can probably be fixed if the second issue is fixed :-) No comments on the code yet; it's too late here.
Any more movement on this one, it's still an issue in 2.22/23
Just tried the attached patch on latest 2.22 tarballs and I'm seeing all the issues mentioned by Vincent, I have to say I'm not a big fan of the constant resizing up and down depending on the size of the descriptive text. Really should just set a reasonable min size which would cater for most of the text in a default font size scenario, thus minimizing the amount of automatic resizing required. The current descriptions min size is set at 300x120 Would a more reasonable size be 500x200
Created attachment 110282 [details] [review] Patch V2 I've taken the original patch and amended the sections for Vertical Label so that it resizes better. Well I think it does. Another solution to this issue would be amend the scrolling mechanism 1. If Text of label can fit in default size then scroll as currently. 2. If text does not fit in default label then scroll really slowly allowing a user to read the text as it scrolls, and instead of stopping when the top of the text reaches the top of the window, continue scrolling until all the text has been scrolled slowly by. This approach would remove the need to constantly resize the gnome-about dialog depending on the text displayed, I think the contant resizing is not an ideal solution.
Matt: for me, the issue is still that the width of the vertical label is constant. It should really change when the font size changes. This would fix most issues with Guillaume's patch.
I think there are possibly two issues here. 1. Ensuring all text is seen in various fonts for the current default values stored in gnome-version.xml, in this case then ensuring the width changes would solve this. In this case gnome-about would simply resize once in a reaction to a font change, and remain static for all of the messages displayed. 2. For vendor specific delivered content in gnome-version.xml, where the text could actually be quite large, and depending on fonts etc just can't fit into a single screen, regardless of how large gnome-about resizes itself to. A possible solution for No.2 scenarios could be : --- snip from previous comment ---- 2. If text does not fit in default label then scroll really slowly allowing a user to read the text as it scrolls, and instead of stopping when the top of the text reaches the top of the window, continue scrolling until all the text has been scrolled slowly by. --- snip -------------------------- In either case I'd disregard the updated patch I submitted... it's not appropriate.
Created attachment 110527 [details] [review] Patch V2.01 Attached another V2 patch, obsoleting my previous resizing fix. This time I am suggesting that instead of resizing gnome-about dialog, simply scroll the text slower. - Monitor the height of the label compared to the height of it's layout container. - If the height of the label is less than it's container and continue as normal as all the text is being displayed - If the height of the label is greater than it's layout container, then all text is not being displayed, so when it comes to scrolling the text, scroll at a fraction of the previous pace, giving the user and chance to read it all. This patch is much simpler and smaller than the previous patch and even it's deemed to not solve this problem completely, I still think it's better than what's there at the moment :)
I think it's a reasonable fix, but tbh this dialog really isn't great-- the text scrolling isn't particularly smooth, is too fast for comfort at times, and having stuff scrolling in two different directions at the same time really isn't pleasant. As such, I wouldn't say it's a good advertisment for either our design skills or our underlying technologies :/ If nothing else, it might be good to have an optional "License" button in the gnome-about dialog, like the one in the regular application About box, for distros (like Sun's) that have too much licensing info to sensibly fit in the main scrolling region.
(In reply to comment #20) > If nothing else, it might be good to have an optional "License" button in the > gnome-about dialog, like the one in the regular application About box, for > distros (like Sun's) that have too much licensing info to sensibly fit in the > main scrolling region. GNOME has many paragraphs which are not license-related. They're just describing what's the project.
gnome-about has been removed in GNOME 3