259959 - Some localized text (eg Khmer) take too much vertical space Thunderbird 800x600

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040707 Firefox/0.9.2
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 0.7.3

When Thunderbird is localized to Khmer, a language that requires a lot of
vertical space in each line, some of Thunderbird Windows (auto re-sizable)
become too big for the screen when using 600x800 screen resolution. Other
windows do not resize, but do not display some of their content. One of this
windows has already been included in bug 259228, so it will not be mentioned
here. This bug pretends to cover all other cases.

The windows that have too much vertical space are:

Options --> general

http://www.khmeros.info/tools/bugs/option_general.JPG

Options --> fonts

http://www.khmeros.info/tools/bugs/option_font.JPG

Options --> display

http://www.khmeros.info/tools/bugs/option_display.JPG

Options --> Composition


http://www.khmeros.info/tools/bugs/option_composition.JPG

Junk mail Control Window

http://www.khmeros.info/tools/bugs/junk_mail_control.JPG

Account setting -> server

http://www.khmeros.info/tools/bugs/acc_set_server.JPG

Account settings --> Security

http://www.khmeros.info/tools/bugs/acc_set_security.JPG

Account settings --> News Offline

http://www.khmeros.info/tools/bugs/acc_set_news_offline.JPG



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Localize to Khmer, or use Khmer font for English version (gives the same line
height as if it was in Khmer. A Khmer font can be downloaded from
http://www.khmeros.info/khmeros_download.html
2. Open the specified windows
3.



Expected Results:  
Information, dialog boxes, etc... should be restructured within the window if
enough (and the stetic result is nice), otherwise the window would rither have
to scroll or the content should be distributed into more than one screen.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This is hardly unique to localized versions. Most of the Thunderbird windows do
not display correctly at 800x600 even in English.

Comment 2

[gekacheka]

The vertical spacing depends primarily on the font size, not the locale.
(Line wrapping can also affect also vertical size, and depends on text length,
which depends on locale.)

On w2k, I can set the english to use a font size in dialogs by
  Start | Settings | Control Panel | Display
    Appearance (tab)
      XP: select "Extra Large" font size, or click "advanced" and do as w2k:
      W2k: Click on the message text in the grey dialog box.
           Set font size to 12 in "Size:" drop down.
           Click "Apply" button.

On my screen, a setting of 12 (extra large) corresponds to the vertical spacing
in the images.  (Uppercase roman letters are 12 pixels high, descenders add 3
pixels more below, and accented uppercase letters may add more above.)

So this could be interpreted as a request to design dialogs so that they will
fit on an 800x600 screen using size 12 (extra large).

(In the US, only computers with the largest screens are sold with this setting,
most are sold with size 8 "normal".  With size 8 "normal", the dialog does fit
on a 800x600 screen, and it possible but not not marketable for reading Asian
fonts like chinese/kanji characters as noted in bug 259228 comment 1.)

Comment 3

[gekacheka]

Attachment: options pref pages: add overflow: auto vbox so scrollbar is available if screen too short

(patch -p 2 -i file.patch)

For each tall Options window page: adds vbox with overflow: auto.  If the
window height is too short, a scrollbar appears to make the rest of the page
accessible.  Otherwise change is invisible.

Comment 4

[gekacheka]

Attachment: junkMail.xul patch: Divide tall tab into smaller tabs at groups to fit in 800x600 with extra-large/Asian fonts

(patch -p 2 -i file.patch)

Minimal change puts each group from tall settings tab into its own tab, so they
stay in same order.

Old:
  /Settings\	 /Adaptive Filter\
    WhiteList
    Handling
    Logging

New:
  /WhiteList\	/Handling\   /Logging\	/Adaptive Filter\
    Whitelist	  Handling     Logging

Comment 5

[gekacheka]

Attachment: account manager am-main/offline/server.xul patch: add vbox with overflow:auto so scrollbar available if screen too short

(patch -l -p 2 -i file.patch)

Adds vbox with overflow:auto in tallest group so scrollbar appears if screen
too short.

Rationale: Added a new vbox after caption rather than adding
overflow:auto to groupbox because adding overflow:auto to groupbox
causes caption to be nested inside rather than staying placed on
border.  Adjusted flex so appears ok on both short and tall screens.

Comment 6

[gekacheka]

How above patches were tested:
1.  Set extra-large font size as described in comment 2.
2.  Set screen resolution to 800x600.  
    (required for Tools | Account Settings, which is not resizable; 
     others could be reduced on large screen by resizing dialog to 800x570)
    On windows:
    a. (Save editor buffers just in case.  Shut down firefox, maybe 
       flash or something can't handle change and might hang OS.)
    b. right-click desktop | properties | settings tab
       Move slider to 800x6000.
       Click "Apply".
    c. Click yes when asked whether to keep setting.

3. Start thunderbird (with patched files in chrome/mail.jar)
4. Check dialogs to make sure all controls are reachable and readable, by
scrolling if necessary
  a. Tools | Options
    i. General
    ii. Display
    iii. Composition
    iv.  Fonts
  b. Tools | Junk Mail Controls
    check all four tabs
  c. Tools | Account Settings
    i. default email account page
    ii. default email account: Server Settings page
    iii. newsgroup account: Offline & Disk Space page

Comment 7

[Javier SOLA]

In latin typography height depends on point size, and all 12 points are supposed
to be equal. Indic typography has several parallel lines of typing. Khmer and
Thai, for example, have 5 lines. There is a main line of writing, then one line
above for above consonant vowels and marks, and three lines below, two for
subscript consonants (consonants placed below another consonant) and one more
for a possible vowel (when there are already two subscript consonants). The
problem of size is not in seeing the main consonant, you could make this one
smaller...the problem is with the much smaller subscript consonants, which
cannot be clearly seen if they are two small... the result is that for size 12,
you need the same amount of vertical space than for an English size 24. 

If you use a font that gives you both English and Khmer, you will get Khmer
vertical spacing in an English font. You can try this with the Khmer OS System font.

http://www.khmeros.info/khmeros_download.html

Does the solution to this bug have a requirement of NOT changing the English UI?
If it is so, I would like to know.

gekacheka, first of all, thanks for your work on this.

Technically, using elevators solves the window out of the screen problem, but it
creates new ones:

- Not all versions of Thunderbird have the same user interface. Documentation
has to be different.
- Sometimes the user will go nuts looking for the OK button, which is some place
in which you have to use elevator to get there.

The result if that you end up with versions of Thunderbird that are inferior in
quality for Indic languages, and maybe for East Asian (more than half of the world).

Some of the cases can be solved by just making the windows a little wider, and
others, like the abNewCardDialog, can be restructured in five tabs instead of
three, solving the problem in an elegant manner.

Others require a little more restructuration, but I believe that it is possible
to solve most cases without using the elevators, therefore maintaining the same
UI for all versions of Thunderbird. 

Maintaining the elevators for extreme cases sounds like a great idea, but we
should try not to use them.


 

Comment 8

[gekacheka]

> for size 12, you need the same amount of vertical space than for an
> English size 24. 
> 
> If you use a font that gives you both English and Khmer, you will
> get Khmer vertical spacing in an English font. You can try this with
> the Khmer OS System font.
> 
> http://www.khmeros.info/khmeros_download.html

This sounds like a better approach for testing Khmer, though my
approach was close.  Is this the default font, or very near to it?
What size is the default size?  It looks like the size in the
screenshots is size 9 in this font.  (I compared the length of the
text "ews.mozilla.org" in different sizes to the AccountSettings
screen shots.)

DIALOG ERRONEOUSLY MUCH SMALLER THAN SCREEN: When I set the MessageText
font size to size 8 or size 9 in this font, the AccountSettings dialog
does not fill the space available and cuts off pages.  I expected it
to fill the screen if necessary to show as much of its pages as
possible.
 * In size 9, the Security page is cut off at the bottom (can't read the
   buttons) and the Copies and Folder page is cut off at the bottom.
 * In size 8 (EN/western default), the ServerSettings dialog is cut off on the
   right so the scrollbar is inaccessible.  Cut off on the bottom are pages
   Copies and Folders, Return Reciepts, and Security.
The quickest workaround is to make the Account Settings dialog
resizable.  (Patch forthcoming.)

DIALOG ERRONEOUSLY IGNORES WINDOWS TASK BAR HEIGHT: TB takes the max
height of dialogs to be the screen height, which doesn't take into
account whether the task bar is using part of the screen (always on
top is checked, the default).  At size 10, the bottom of the dialog may be
obscured by the task bar, or the dialog may be pushed off the the top of 
the screen as in the screenshots.

> Does the solution to this bug have a requirement of NOT changing
> the English UI?

I don't know.  I assumed that there has been no committed policy so
that it will be still be negotiable, and the simpler the change, the
more likely it would be to be accepted at this late date.

> - Not all versions of Thunderbird have the same user interface.
> Documentation has to be different.

The scrollbars ('elevators') minimize this issue, since everything is
still on the same page in the same relative location.  It just
requires a little scrolling.  This could be an issue for people who
have never used scrollbars before (an email application is a possible
first use for compouters), so documentation may want to introduce
scrollbars once at the beginning.  But most people have used web pages
which require scrolling.

The tab division patches keep everything in the same order, so things should be
easy to find, especially if documentation is in the same order.

> - Sometimes the user will go nuts looking for the OK button, which
> is some place
> in which you have to use elevator to get there.

The scrollbars are inside the page.  The ok button is part of the
dialog footer, outside the page.  So you never have to scroll to reach
the ok button.  (The OK button might get hidden by the "Dialog
erroneously ignores windows task bar" problem.)

Comment 9

[gekacheka]

Attachment: accountUtils.js: open AccountSettings dialog as resizable to work around dialog-too-small bugs in some fonts

(patch -l -p 2 -i file.patch)

Dialog too-small problem seems to occur with the KhmerOS System font even with
a large screen.  It does not occur with the windows standard english font
(Tahoma 8).

This patch makes it possible to resize the dialog if this problem occurs, so
the scrollbar and controls at the bottom of pages are reachable.

If you start with no profile on a large screen and normal english fonts, the
account settings dialog does come up the usual size without scrollbars.  (If
you have an existing profile, it will reuse the previous size if it can.)

Comment 10

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

It's too late to be making significant UI changes like splitting up dialog tabs.
Changes like that need to happen much earlier in the cycle and require usability
evaluation and feedback cycles that we don't have. 

Changes like this require significant more time than we have and should land
early in alpha cycles -- not at the last minute.

Comment 11

[gekacheka]

Attachment: junkMail.xull patch: add overflow: auto to vbox so scrollbar available if screen to short

(patch -l -p 2 -i file.patch)

(Instead of dividing tab into multiple tabs):
This patch adds "overflow:auto" to large tab vbox and adjusts flex so scrollbar
appears if screen too short.  persist allows user to adjust size once so
scrollbars do not reappear, minheight prevents scrollbar from appearing on
first use in default windows font (size 8) (overridden if screen is shorter).

Comment 12

[gekacheka]

Attachment: account manager am-smime.xul patch: add vbox with overflow:auto so scrollbar available if screen too short

(patch -l -p 2 -i file.patch)

If screen is too short for Account Manager's page on Security, adds scrollbar
to vbox so user can scroll content region within dialog.

Comment 13

[August]

I use Thunderbird 1.0.2-6 on Fedora Core 4. The "Tools -> Junk Mail Controls"
dialog is too large and there is no way I can access the lowest part of it in
resolution 800x600. Very annoying! Why not design *all* dialogs according to:

if dialog window is not fully visible then
   add a scrollbar to it
end

?

-- akarl

Comment 14

[Javier SOLA]

The good solution is better design, with smaller windows and more tabs. With all
respect to the work done on this, elevators is a smart, but counterintuitive
solution for these kinds of windows, and a pain to document with screenshots.

All the large window problems have been correctly solved in the Khmer version
(which, by being modified cannot be called Thunderbird)

Comment 15

[Scott MacGregor]

Comment on attachment 167799 [details] [diff] [review]
options pref pages:  add overflow: auto vbox so scrollbar is available if screen too short

I'm not a fan of inserting scrollbars into these dialogs.

Comment 16

[Jo Schaper]

Just went to add an address to address book in 800x600 screen,  Version 1.5.0.9 (20061207) and cannot do so using standard English small font size. I cannot use 1024x768 due to vision problems. Set 1024x768 to Large Fonts, and could get to the OK button. Many of the empty boxes in Address book are superfluous for an average user. If you could remove some of them, the OK button would be usable under 800x600. Now am gong to have to go back and reset screen res. What a pain! 
Problem will exacerbate as population gets older.

Comment 17

[John O'Duinn [:joduinn] (please use "needinfo?" flag)]

Javier, I just found this 6.5 year old bug (!!!) while searching for open bugs about Khmer. Is this still a problem with a recent version of Thunderbird?

Comment 18

[Vannak Eng]

we haven't test it yet.

Comment 19

[Brian Marks]

Close/Okay buttons are unavailable for Thunderbird 12.0.1 on account settings window in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.  It's necessary to ALT-space and maximize the window to make the buttons available.  By default the window is not maximized.  One possible solution would be to give the window a scroll bar if it doesn't all fit on the screen.  
Resolution		: 1366x768 pixels
OpenGL Renderer		: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ironlake Mobile

Comment 20

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Khoem, can you tell us for what resolutions this might still be a problem?  Thanks

(800x600 should no longer be so common (old laptops perhaps), so I'm not sure we need be so concerned about this resolution. But higher res we should be concerned.)