Re: GNOME Dictionary Applet window resizable

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi Lars,

On Mon, 2006-05-15 at 20:53 +0200, Lars Tobias B�ng wrote:

> The dictionary applet is probably the most useful applet on my
> gnome-panel. I've used it for a couple of years, and I find it is vital
> desktop inventory. Many thanks to you for this program!

Thanks to you.

> I have a few issues with the new definitions window, though. Most
> importantly; it's not resizable.

Implementing the ability to resize the window while retaining the
"docked" state is tricky at best.  Might be possible, but it also might
break in subtle ways.

>  When looking up a word, the results
> appear in a tiny text window with scrollbars and large clear, print and
> save buttons. The only text that fits in the window is the headline of
> the definition, and I must scroll both vertically and horizontally to
> read the definition. I think it's good practice to make all windows
> containing text resizable. It would also be great if it automatically
> resized the window to fit the text, up until a maximum allowed size, of
> course.

The window already tries to "intelligently" resize itself depending on
the font size; unfortunately, we don't control neither the width or the
height of the text, as it comes to us pre-formatted from the dictionary
server.  Actually, this cause us some headaches, parsing-wise and
display-wise.

Something that could work would be:

  scan the whole array of lines returned by the server
    find the longest line
  resize width = min (font-size * length (longest line), screen width)
  resize heigth = min (font-size * number (lines), screen height)

I'll see if I can come up with something useful.

> Also, would it be desirable to add a preferences option to not show the
> large action buttons on the bottom of the window?

It's a poor man's toolbar for quickly access the actions; I could use a
real toolbar, though.

> What do you think of my thoughts?

Thanks for bringing them out: it helps knowing what users want. :-)

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi - <ebassi gmail com>
Log: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net