GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 732882
Message dialogs - padding and text justification issues
Last modified: 2014-08-03 18:39:32 UTC
Message dialogs don't look great right now. There is too much padding above the content, and the mix of centered and left-justified text can often look odd and unbalanced.
Created attachment 280125 [details] [review] patch This removes the extra vertical space and uses centered padding throughout. It looks a lot better, in my opinion.
As I said on irc, I not a great fan of centered text, since it makes reading harder, frankly speaking I prefer the current way (centered title + left aligned text) modulo vertical padding.
Created attachment 280126 [details] [review] alternative patch We should remove the unnecessary padding, whatever happens.
Created attachment 280127 [details] patch comparison screenshot Left-aligned body with a centred heading works if you have a long block of body text, but with a short body text (as is typical for message dialogs), there's no identifiable alignment point on the right. This leaves the dialog looking unbalanced - you have a line on the left, but none on the right. This leaves the heading looking unanchored on one side.
Definitely agree that mixing a centered header and left aligned block makes no sense, however I lean towards left aligning both to having multiline centered block. I am fine with pushing that through though.
Created attachment 280219 [details] [review] patch - left-justified text throughout (In reply to comment #5) > Definitely agree that mixing a centered header and left aligned block makes no > sense, however I lean towards left aligning both to having multiline centered > block. I am fine with pushing that through though. I'd be happy to try left-aligned. I had some issues with this patch - the heading and body text of the message dialog shown by the inspector aren't aligned. Not sure if that's an issue with that specific dialog or whether I'm getting it wrong.
I should probably point out that the example dialog in widget-factory looks the way it does because it has an explicit linebreak (I was trying to reproduce the HIG example). If you take that out, the secondary text comes out as a single line.
Created attachment 280518 [details] comparison with short vs long text (without manual linebreaks)
Lets just call it good enough for now