GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 99921
Icon view line breaking should be smarter
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
On the desktop and in icon views in general, I have noticed that Nautilus tends to character linebreak, i.e. rip apart words, in labels that it considers "long", very early. This can lead to severe ugliness with languages that tend to produce long words, for example in German, a language that doesn't allow to split up composite words using spaces. One could use dashes, but the icon view also doesn't know how to break words at typical punctuation marks like dashes, so in some languages there is no possibility to produce nice-looking icon labels. As the icon view aims to be good looking, I consider this a bug. I suggest that the default line-breaking width be enhanced - it is very narrow by default, IMHO, breaking just after the icon margins - or made adjustable, and that a word-break algorithm be implemented that knows punctuation marks, I suppose one might be taken from Gtk.
The linebreaking algorithm used is the word-breaking one specified in the unicode standard, but it falls back to character wrapping for words that don't fit in one line. Having wider word-breaking means less icons per line, and the nautilus layout is considered to sparse already. BTW. Do you use compact layout? It so, disabling that does make the line-width larger.
Does this mean the bug is WONTFIX?
Marking as WONTFIX per Alex Larsson's suggestion.