[Printing-architecture] Coding the Common Printing Dialog and its interface

[Alex Wauck]

Clarification:
It is an aspect ratio restriction.  If it was a simple height restriction,
it would be easy.  Fixed aspect ratio is still a pain in the butt in Qt, and
it has certain usability/user experience implications.  Plus, I'm not sure
what the advantage is.  The ratio between the widths of the columns is
useful and not a problem, but I would like to at least see a clear reason
for making all columns the same height as the width of the second column.

Alex

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 6:48 PM, Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf.meeuwissen at avasys.jp>
wrote:

> Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Peter, what is the importance of your column height restrictions? Or is
> > it only an aspect ratio restriction (see Alex' problems below)?
>
> As mentioned earlier in feedback on the CPD, absolute dimensions are
> no good when you need to consider i18n and/or assistive technologies.
> Given the various languages you will need to cater to, string lengths
> will vary, considerably.  For certain scripts, small font sizes just
> don't work.  For Japanese, for example, anything less than 12pt is
> next to unreadable.  Even 12pt is only hardly bearable.
>
> > Josef, you as expert on automatic dialog creation, can you help Alex
> > here? AFAIR there was only a restriction on the aspect ratio of the
> > columns and not on the absolute height.
>
> Fixed aspect ratios may be okay, but, again, given the variation in
> string lengths, I doubt it.  What may be two characters in Japanese
> (corresponding to four Latin characters, space wise and using a fixed
> width font) may very well be 20 characters in German.  That is to say,
> when considering strings, the horizontal and vertical dimensions vary
> independently so trying to maintain a fixed aspect ratio is at best
> cumbersome.
>
> Also note, that word wrapping may not work as you are used to in CJK
> locales.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> > [snip]
> --
> Olaf Meeuwissen                   FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS Corporation
> FSF Associate Member #1962           sign up at http://member.fsf.org/
>
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