On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Michael Grosberg wrote:
The biggest space waster seems to be the color gradients in the fill&stroke dialogs. currently on Ubuntu + human theme they are 225 pixels wide and cannot be made smaller. If they could be scaled down to 128 that would save a lot of space. But it's basically a problem of widget size - all the combo boxes, spinners, sliders and buttons have very large margins and padding. I suppose it has to do with the theme, but Gimp somehow manages to overcome this so I'm sure it's not impossible to do this for Inkscape as well.
It has to do with theme, yes. Most themes used and distributed have insane padding and too large icons. Somehow few theme authors care about that. Dust Compact themes looks good, and there are several others.
GIMP partly solves the issue by using smaller font size for docks and a customized theme that uses current system engine, but changes padding and the like withing the engine and, IIRC, partly in code. This is something we could try to do as well.
Alexandre