Label Alignment in KDE4

[Luciano Montanaro]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 3:30 AM, Celeste Lyn Paul <celeste at kde.org> wrote:
>
> The biggest issue is getting the input and combo labels aligned because this
> effects a lot of the look and feel.  If it really is that big of a deal to
> have flipped checkbox labels (i.e. requires hacks, lots of thinking), I guess
> we can make it optional and fix them as we find usability issues.  Checkbox
> label alignment and position can effect usability as I showed in some of my
> examples but I'd rather see some of the form alignment fixed than none.

Yes, this is exactly the point I was trying to make.

>
> As for groupboxes vs hlines, I'm not sure I understand what you mean.  The
> benefit of group boxes is not just the separation (grouping) they provide,
> but also the label.  A lot of information would be lost if there was just a
> horizontal line.

Sorry, I have not been clear. I thought there was some widget looking
a bit like:

--- Label Text ------------------
 [x] A checkbox
 Text: [_________]

--- Label 2 Text ----------------
and so on.

but apparently there isn't... On the other hand, we could simply use a
label, ore derive some kind of suitable seprator from the QLabel
widget...

Probably the hline+text widget I was thinking about would not even
work too well with the Oxygen design.

The issue with groupboxes is that making widget alignments match
across different groupboxes cannot be done by Qt, but requires walking
the widget hierarchy to find the longest label (which is unreliable
anyway) and then walking it again to fix up the aligments.
It's awkward and it could lead to flashing widgets or redraws, while
using the Label-separator thing would work even with the current grid
layout engine. Also, a preview in QDesigner would be identical to the
dialog used in the program, while with the groupbox+fixup the UI
designer would have to make a guess and hope the layout will work.

-- 
Luciano Montanaro

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