Re: gtkdialog maximum size

[rbd <rbd soest hawaii edu>]

I second Stefan's suggestion of encapsulating your dialog panel within a 
scrolled window, and in fact I have made it a habit to implement that for 
every major toplevel window in all of my GUI software. You never know when 
an app that was designed for a nice fat desktop display will end up being 
run on a teeny-weeny laptop. Use the screen dimension discovery functions 
and the toplevel window size hints to set a maximum size on your toplevel 
window so that it's always guaranteed to be fully visible, even if the 
larger embedded scrolled window is only partially visible. You don't ever 
want to be in a position where your 'Click to Continue' button is 
completely inaccessable because it's hanging off the bottom of the screen.

Another solution I have used in the couple of odd cases where I was forced 
to show an especially large dialog, e.g., to configure plot parameters for 
a rather complex mapping display with dozens of display options, is to 
group your dialog components into subsets and access each group 
independently via a secondary dialog window which you display only when 
the user clicks on an 'Edit Group X Parameters' button in the main dialog.

I'm not a big fan of small font sizes to make things fit -- if you've 
already got what is practically a fullscreen window filled to overflowing, 
then making all those widgets smaller is just going to leave you with an 
illegible mess. Solve your problem through better organization, not 
miniaturization.

Roger Davis
Univ. of Hawaii