Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 9:12 PM, Michael Grosberg wrote:
Hey... I never said that... it got bigger because Inkscape has acquired a lot of new functionality... Important functionality.
Well, not exactly. Two examples.
- "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"?). 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. - Andreas