On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:22 PM, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
- "Fill and Stroke" and "LPE" dialogs. They are quite wide mostly
because we use labels instead of icons, and labels, being more descriptive, take a lot of space, especially when translated (English is known for its words to be shorter in average that equivalents in many other languages).
Apparently the fill and stroke dialog currently use both icons and text (!). Regarding icons in tabs only. A downside of using icons instead of labels of text is that icons can be quite subjective, text labels on the other hand are really clear and straight forward (how does one illustrate "snap"?).
A read square around a node in a path :)
Interface designer Aza Raskin wrote some wise words about this some time ago: http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/06/25/the_end_of_an_icon/
The idea to make it configurable what to show sounds a bit suboptimal. Perhaps there is some more clever way to solve the problem at hand.
Well, I'm not saying we should use icons _everywhere_. The way it is done in GIMP works pretty cool. Just try using text in tab captions there and you'll see the difference immediately :)
Anyway, GIMP/SVN trunk already has smaller text for dialogs only to make widgets smaller. So we can try either way.
Alexandre