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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Word-wrap in message boxes.
From:       Waldo Bastian <bastian () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-01-15 1:34:24
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On Monday 14 January 2002 02:08 pm, Rolf Magnus wrote:
> On Monday 14 January 2002 22:33, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> > As of today, KMessageBox does not support word-wrap any longer.
>
> Any specific reason? I can't see any advantage of not supporting word-wrap.

Well basically our word-wrap isn't good enough. There are a few problems:
1) We don't know how big the messagebox should be. That gets complicated by 
the fact that Qt is currently buggy and doesn't provide correct sizeHints in 
all situations. Theoretically we can pick any size above the minimum required 
size, and the text is supposed to flow into that, but chances are that this 
will look like shit. We also have a bunch of dialogs from 2.2 times that 
still have manual line-breaks and those are really ugly because it can happen 
that they automatically break one-word before the manual break. On the other 
hand if we use manual line-breaks we can size the dialog to fit the contents 
(see also 2) and whoever wrote the text can fidle with the line-breaks to 
make it a nice dialog that is well-balanced.

2) We sometimes have data that exceeds reasonable width, e.g. think of a 200 
character-long URL. We need to truncate that because otherwise we can end up 
with a dialog twice as wide as your screen, but that is rather hard with 
automatic word-breaks and it is very likely that the result will again look 
like shit due to single words ending up on a line of their own.

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian@kde.org  |   SuSE Labs KDE Developer  |  bastian@suse.com

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