ToolTips and Automatic Formatting

Fri Aug 16 08:44:45 UTC 2013

Heya,

as we noticed recently, many of Amarok's ToolTips look very ugly and
have readability issues because they are not formatted. Therefore a
longer ToolTip is being rendered as one giant long line. The Qt API
offers automatic formatting with line-breaks for ToolTips, but there
is an ugly API quirk: The formatting can only be switched on by adding
a <html> tag to the string. In theory a wrapper could be created for
QWidget::setToolTip() and friends, but this wouldn't play nice with Qt
Designer.

I think for consistency's sake it would be ideal to simply switch on
automatic formatting for *all* of our ToolTips, and not bother with
manual line-breaks. This is also because with translations it's
impossible to know the final length and look of the strings. The
downside is, we would have to change nearly all ToolTip strings in
Amarok (this could be done with some clever sed use).

What do you think is the best way to go forward?

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe
http://amarok.kde.org - http://fsfe.org