Item names should ellipsize at the center

[David Siegel]

Dash item names currently ellipsize at the end; instead, they should ellipsize at the middle.

Once item icon/thumbnail sizes are increased, labels will be wider anyway.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

MPT has a piece written somewhere on smart ellipsis, can we publish that
and refer to it as a common pattern?

Mark

[David Siegel (djsiegel-deactivatedaccount)]

MPT, can you please point me to the ellipsis spec? Is it appropriate here?

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The stuff I wrote about smart ellipsis is at <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=549729> plus <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99604#c7>. It should be implemented in GTK, but I'm not sure whether it could apply to the sound menu, which only ever displays one item at a time. (My idea is based on distinguishing multiple simultaneously visible items.)

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Sorry, for some reason I thought this bug report was about the sound menu. For Unity I guess it would need to be implemented in CluTK.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Agree, it should only apply in cases where there's a known set of items.
I think it's OK if only one item is currently shown if we have reason to
believe the user might be aware of all the other items (even if only
roughly aware).

Mark

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

... it might also be worth taking that thinking from Bugzilla and
putting it more formally on design.c.c. in the Toolkit.

Mark

[Ivanka Majic (ivanka)]

I just searched for shotwell in the dash and got the following:
Shotwell
...oto Manager

Perhaps we could review the ellipsizing?

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

See also bug #741569 ("Dash Find Find Find Find ellipses the only unique word") which wasn't actually solved, but was worked around by shortening the names in bug #729002 ('First four items in Dash begin "Find" "Find" "Find" "Find"') but as demonstrated by the above hasn't really been solved properly.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I don't do Dash design.