468128 - Letters in the middle of too long menu names (>42em) are replaced by an ellipsis

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: XUL, defect)

Description

[Nomis101]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; de-de) AppleWebKit/528.5+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; de; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20081204 Thunderbird/3.0b1

In the german Thunderbird 3 Mac build the string "Gekennzeichnete Nachrichten herrunterladen" is to long and so it is interrupted and shown as "Gekennzeichnete Na..richten herrunterladen". You will find it at: Datei --> Offline

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a german Thunderbird 3 build
2. Go to: Datei --> Offline
3.  
Actual Results:  
You will see the line "Gekennzeichnete Na..richten herrunterladen"


I've also mentioned this in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=466807#c28

Comment 1

[Nomis101]

I've tried to follow the instructions for bugs found in Beta1 and mark as blocking bug 463057:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Thunderbird3/TestInstructions/Beta1

Comment 2

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

Are there existing rules for max string length in OS X menus?

Comment 3

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/themes/pmstripe/global/menu.css#154

The CSS limits strings in menus to 42em.

Comment 4

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

I'll fix this for upcoming builds, but it shouldn't be a show stopper for 3.0b1 - so removing the block.

Comment 5

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

The better question here is if it's ok to limit the menu names to 42em. Alex, what do you think about this UI limitation? Shall we increase or remove it?

The correct link to the CSS definition is:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/themes/pinstripe/global/menu.css#150

This limitation was added some years ago with no bug filed:
1.2 	ben%bengoodger.com	2004-06-18 14:06	 	More Winstripe/Pinstripe Restructuring

http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvslog.cgi?file=mozilla/toolkit/themes/pinstripe/global/menu.css&rev=1.16

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Nomis101 was correct in setting the reference to bug 463057 - which is not to indicate blockers of b1, but to identify bugs found during b1 release code testing

Comment 7

[Sebastian Hengst [:aryx] (needinfo me if it's about an intermittent or backout)]

This problem also affects Firefox in German:

Lesezeichen-Menü > "Lesezeichen für alle Tabs hinzufügen (Strg+Umschalt+D)" is cut off
This is also problematic for extension menus, i.e. there is an extension which should offer the menu "Lesezeichen für alle Tabs sofort hinzufügen (Strg+Alt+D)".

Comment 8

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

So this bug maybe is not only [de]? Should we change the bugs component?

Comment 9

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

That will happen on all OS and its mainly a core issue which should be fixed. It will not only be the German locale which is affected by this limitation.

It would be still great to have a ui decision here. Moving to appropriate component and resetting QA contact and assignee. I believe its nothing you can do on your side Alex I. We still need some input from the UX theme. Alex F will hopefully give this.

Comment 10

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

re-adding the blocker

Comment 11

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

As a general rule our applications (Firefox, Thunderbird) should try to limit the number of words in menu names so that this doesn't become an issue when we localize.

However, I'm not sure that imposing a fixed length at a platform level is a good idea since we don't know what applications are going to be built using the platform, what languages they are going to localize to (if at all), and why they might think that having a really long menu name is a good idea.

Does anyone know about limits for length on each of the operating systems?  We might want to try to match those on each individual operating system.

Comment 12

[Neil Deakin]

Menu labels are constrained to avoid overlong bookmark labels.

Note also that this is a Mac native menu so isn't affected by css, and is being constrained by the OS.

Comment 13

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

(In reply to comment #12)
> Menu labels are constrained to avoid overlong bookmark labels.
> 
> Note also that this is a Mac native menu so isn't affected by css, and is being
> constrained by the OS.

Markus, do you know something about this truncation on OS X menus?

Comment 14

[Nomis101]

With Interface Builder I've tested how long a  string could be before it will get interrupted. The maximum length was 144 characters. But maybe this depends on my display resolution or anything else that is user dependent. Because I couldn't find any entry about maximum string length on Apple Developer site.

OS X 10.5.5

Comment 15

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I think this problem is going to be best left to the applications and localizers working together.  A platform level solution, ignoring what OS level constraints exist, seems like swinging a very large hammer at a tiny nail.

Comment 16

[Nomis101]

Just to remind of this, I still have the problem from the initial post in
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; de; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090223 Thunderbird/3.0b2

Comment 17

[Nomis101]

I still have this issue in Thunderbird Beta 4, and this looks very unesthetic. Is there any hope for a fix or will we also see this in Thunderbird 3.0 Final?

Comment 18

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

The line to change here is
const short kMaxItemPixelWidth = 300;
in nsMenuUtilsX::GetTruncatedCocoaLabel.

Comment 19

[Nomis101]

Attachment: Screenshot of my finding

Today I found something interesting. I still see this issue in my own build, in the official 3.1b and in 3.2a1pre. But if I build the same code in x86_64, than the ellipsis is gone. But I have absolutely no idea why the replacement with the ellipsis doesn't occur anymore in an x86_64 build. It's exactly the same code and the same add_options.

Comment 20

[Nomis101]

This in the meantime works for me.