ToolTips and Automatic Formatting

Mon Aug 19 11:11:32 UTC 2013

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Mark Kretschmann <kretschmann at kde.org> wrote:
> 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?

To illustrate the issue, have a look at this screenshot:

http://wstaw.org/m/2013/08/19/plasma-desktopmh2376.png

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