sizes of dialog windows

[Bug Importer]

The various dialogs in Inkscape (stroke\fill, gradient,
text, etc) create too much clutter on the work area,
limiting the amount of available space for actual work.
Many of the dialogs are unnecessarily wide, so people
with lower resolutions (lower than 1280X960, that is!)
have a hard time working with Inkscape.

A system like Gimp's where you can stack and tab many
dialogs into a single window would be ideal, and also
Gimp's two themes for large and small displays would be
nice, but in the meantime it would also help if all the
dialogs were just smaller and had the same width so
they could at least be manually placed in a column,
thus freeing a lot of work space.

Michael Grosberg (<email address hidden>)

[Khealy (khealy)]

With regard to the dialogs being unecessarily wide, I
believe this is due to some autosizing mechanism based on
the content it will hold.
For example, the minimum width of the "Document Preferences"
dialog seems to be governed by the length of the "CC
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" License option on the
Metadata tab.

I would also request that all dialogs would have the same
width, so that they could be placed in a column (or the same
height, so that they could go in a row across the bottom of
the screen).

An extension of this would be to have a "Tile Dialogs"
command, that would automatically arrange the dialogs along
one or more of the sides of the main window.
This is somewhat like the following RFE on docking dialogs.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1429912&group_id=93438&atid=604309

Assuming that one is going to have at least one dialog
permanently on screen, then it is hard to see much negative
impact of this type of window/dialog layout......since
windows are rectangular, the main window will not be shrunk
any more by having a column of dialogs as opposed to just one.

[Khealy (khealy)]

My comment about the minimum width of the Document
Preferences dialog being set by the length of the text
strings it contains was specific to Inkscape 0.43. This
appears to have been improved since then - the dialog in
0.44pre3 is much better.

[Peter Lewerin (vermeil-deactivatedaccount)]

Is this still a need for this?

[ScislaC (scislac)]

We have dockable dialogs in svn and in the 0.46 release branch which resolve the described issue (summary was inaccurate).