Re: [lmi] Wrong wxFlexGridSizer usage in about_dialog.cpp

[Greg Chicares]

On 2010-01-14 22:37Z, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
[...]
> trivial to just make the HTML window of the appropriate [minimal] width
> [while still allowing the user to make it wider if he wants to]. And while
> I'm pretty sure that nobody is ever reading licences anyhow, I still think
> that showing lines of 200 characters (width of first line on my monitor
> right now) is somewhat untidy. OTOH using 80% height with ~35em width
> results in a very tall and narrow window (at least on my screen) which is
> not nice neither.
> 
>  So what about a completely different criteria: wouldn't it make sense to
> make the licence look closely to its "canonical representation" at
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html?

I suspect that the layout of that webpage may be accidental. At 800x600,
I have to scroll horizontally to read each line; at 1600x1200, there are
very wide margins on both sides. But with your permission I'll call that
deuterocanonical, and cite as protocanonical another rendering:
  http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt
that, with its seventy-eight-character maximum line length, makes the
point at least as well.

Revision 4744 represents a syncretic compromise. The default rendering
is quite wide--as discussed here:
  http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/lmi/2010-01/msg00013.html
that's less surprising inside an insurance company than a skinny window
that makes the license look a zillion pages long. (The pdf illustrations
we produce exhibit the same tradeoff.) Corporate conventions are at odds
with good typographical practice, so users can resize it to as little as
sixty characters wide. The window can be maximized, but that's not the
default, because "obscuring everything else the user has on his desktop
would be impolite", as you point out here:
  http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/lmi/2010-01/msg00011.html

The proportional font helps to condense the license, as mentioned here:
  http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/lmi/2010-01/msg00018.html
and, for uniformity, revision 4745 uses that font on the "Help | About"
dialog as well. And the inadequate margins around pushbuttons noted in
that message were fixed in revision 4739.