GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 70473
ellipsize task names that don't fit
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
In the current tasklist version, if a task name doesn't fit into a fixed-size button, then ellipsis are added and the full name is available in a tooltip. This is not bad. It might be better if the text was abbreviated rather than truncated. There are a number of fairly straightfoward algorithms that can do this: omit prefixes common to multiple tasks, then drop vowels and remove characters from the ends of words. The algorithm can be iterated until the string is short enough to fit. I think Galeon uses this approach in abbreviating page titles. This is somewhat language-specific -- at the very least a different approach will be required for non-latin character sets.
As you say, this sounds like it might have serious i18n problems. Maybe we should fix Galeon. ;-) We are all in Unicode-world, so any string is potentially in any language; we don't have a way to write "if (english) foo()" really.
Dropping vowels seems like the step immediately before s/you/u/ s/are/r/. Ugh. I think decent ellipsation should be enough without trying to get really clever.
Abbreviation is discussed in Paul Heckel's "The Elements of Friendly Software Design". The algorithm described in the original note reduces things this way (skipping some steps): "Gnome Terminal" "Gnome Terminl" "Gnm Trmnl" "Gn Trm" "GT" I guess hopefully it would only come into play for longre window titles, and they'd never get squished to just two characters. But you get the idea. This might also be used for the title bar of windows that are too narrow to show This is only one way to address the problem of the taskbar getting full of apparently identical tasks. Others include: - allowing taskbar buttons to be nonuniform in size - a usability rule that says windows are called "$DOCUMENT - $APP", so that the window names are more likely to differ in the first few characters
Haven't really thought throught the implications of the rest of it, but we do at least have the HIG guideline already: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig/windows.html#primary-window-titles
fwiw galeon is fixed last time i checked and only includes the web page name in the title bar (galeon2 here) and also i agree with owen, decent elipsizing seems like a better solution to long titles.
Changing the title, since it seems we mostly agree here.
See also bug #99604 which suggests using the Mozilla abbreviation method, which does sound a little more sane (and presumably i18n-friendly, since they've already been there and done it) than the vowel-dropping scheme suggested here.
*** Bug 124331 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Benjamin has a patch; it needs updating but at least he's part way there. So I'm going to mark this as a duplicate of that bug. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 155868 ***