On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 03:41:41PM +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:
Although it is not a bug per se there is/was an option to "Show Close button on dialog" that is unfortunately disabled by default, which defeats the purpose of the Close button. The Gnome HIG recommends including close buttons on dialogs like the Preferences dialog to make things that much clearer for beginners, but if it is off by default Inkscape beginners who it is intended for cannot know to turn it on themselves.
There is an open request for just such functionality so that the Export bitmap dialog might have a Close button: [ 1096715 ] add optional "close" buttons to all dialogs https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1096715&gr...
It's way too late in the game to do anything about this for 0.45.0. Also note that the suggested solution in the RFE from 2005 involves handling it through the gtkmm top level dialog class, but since the Export dialog still hasn't been converted to gtkmm, it's going to require that be done as well. In any case, since it's an RFE not a critical bug, it's not a candidate for the 0.45.* series. However, if you have a patch for it, we could definitely include it in the 0.46 tree. In fact, I bet you have a lot of other ideas that could go towards helping the new gtkmm Dialog class, and I'd be happy to answer questions about it if you'd like to do some hacking on it.
Bryce
but bizarrely the Export dialog does not get a close button when the feature is enabled. Preferences and Layers both do follow the setting. Text dialog always has a close button, as does the About dialog.
The disadvantage of turning it on is that unfortunately 'dialog' refers to both the bigger transitory dialogs which really should have a close button (and probably a help button too[1]) like Preferences and also to the smaller always open dialogs like the Layers palette which are quite different really no one expects to include an extra close button.
This approach assumes all dialogs are the same but they are not, and always open palette/panel style dialogs can and should be treated differently and not be expected to follow the HIG in the same way an ordinary dialog should.
So I'm asking that the feature be turned on by default[2] so that dialogs like Preferences are not left without a Close button. Later the distinction between palettes and ordinary dialogs can be made clearer and the option would be unnecessary and could possibly be remove. From looking at src/ui/dialog/inkscape-preferences.cpp the file in Subversion in an attempt to provide a simple patch this is no longer where it used to be and it may have been moved/removed already. It was still in the nightly build I grabbed from last week. If it is already fixed well then at least I can get on with closing a few requests.
Thanks in advance
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/alanhorkan http://alanhorkan.livejournal.com/
[1] [ 1504038 ] Close (and Help) button(s) in preferences dialog (HIG) http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1504038&gro...
[2] [ 1577253 ] HIG: Show Close buttons on dialogs by default https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1577253&gr...