Style dialog: redesign layout of properties to reduce width
Win 10. MS 3.2.3 (Official). 1680 X 10150 px, 47 cm x 30 cm screen.
Despite attempts to reduce the size of the Style dialog (#276404: Format > Style window is too large), it is bigger than ever – blotting out most of the screen on a Win 7 laptop. Minimum dimensions:
MS 2.3.2: 21 cms by 17 cms.
MS 3.0.0: 22.5 cms x 21cms.
MS 3.2.3: 25.7 cms by 19.5 cm.
The minimum width has increased by 3 cms over 3.0.0: nearly 6cms greater than it was in 2.3.2. The minimum height has decreased a little, but could it be reduced further – i.e. to 17 cm, as it was in 2.3.2? The user needs visual feedback from the score when making changes to the Style dialog, so the user must be able to resize the dialog box to suit the screen size and resolution.
Note: The "collapse arrow" serves no useful purpose in 3.2.3: it simply allows the other section(s) to expand horizontally. But as there is already enough horizontal space to accomodate the text and widgets, all it is doing is adding extra grey space to the dialog.
Comments
Screenshots from a 15 in. laptop (Style window minimized).
MS2:
![screen_ms2.png]( "screen_ms2.png")
MS3:
![screen_ms3.png]( "screen_ms3.png")
MS3 after hiding pane:
![screen_ms3_hide_pane.png]( "screen_ms3_hide_pane.png")
Notice that the width of the window does not decrease as expected. Instead the grey space merely gets wider.
IMV, the underlying problem is the inefficient use of space in the right-hand panel. If you go through the page list one-by-one, and collapse the left-hand panel for each page, you can see that the extra space is simply not needed: All that happens is that existing text boxes get even wider, and more blank grey space is added to the window.
The collapse button serves no purpose and could be removed. Instead, rejig the layout of the properties in order to reduce the width of the dialogue as much as possible,
the collapse button does server a purpose: reduce height! So it should not get removed
Some inspectors are wider than others, the widest uncollapsed inspector determins the needed grand total width.
Edit: hold on, seems I confuse Edit Style with Inspector...
I see, that collaps button indeed doesn't seem to be doing anything useful, width wise
However, the height of that dialog is the much bigger issue, as is (currently) even hides items on the Score and Page tab (dealt with in #314646: Not all text visible in Format > Style > Score and Page settings dialog in 3.6 Beta) and still might be to high on certain screen sizes and settings to show the OK/Cancel/Apply/Apply to all Parts buttons
See PR #7154
Fixed in branch 3.x, commit 564e2e75fe
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.