[scribus-dev] workaround for bigger-than-screen Preferences dialog

[Craig Bradney]

Gregory Pittman wrote:
> I recently bought a netbook (Dell 2100 N), which I would advise anyone
> considering a netbook to consider. First of all, an option is to have
> it come with Ubuntu pre-installed. The main value to me is that I
> immediately know that at least _some_ version of Linux will manage the
> hardware issues. Without getting into any distro-bashing, I'll just go
> on to say that as soon as I could, I replaced Ubuntu with Fedora 11,
> mainly because I'm more comfortable with it, and have lots of
> experience compiling Scribus on Fedora. [One of the lame things about
> this factory-installed Ubuntu is that you lose >5GB of your 16GB SSD
> to a vfat "rescue partition", which, if you booted into by mistake or
> on purpose, would completely blow away any data you might have saved
> in Ubuntu and restore you to a pristine factory-installed state. (ie,
> Dell-Linux for Dummies)]
>
> Ok, getting back to this list, once I had Fedora, then I knew all
> about SVN and cmake and compiling Scribus. Everything went well until
> I opened File > Preferences, and noted that the Preferences dialog
> ends up being taller than the 576 pixels this netbook can manage. The
> problem this causes is that you might be able to make various changes
> in your Preferences, but how do you save them? Eventually I figured
> out that I could make changes, then press Alt+O as an equivalent for
> the Ok button. I would add at this point that, in contrast to some
> other apps with this problem, you cannot Tab to the offscreen Ok
> button -- it seems to get stuck at the first offscreen button,
> regardless of whether you're doing Tab or Shift+Tab.
>
> The Solution:
> Eventually, with some playing around that many of us Linux users are
> prone to, I can report that, at least with Fedora 11 and KDE, if you
> click on the little icon in the upperleft part of the title bar, you
> can then select Advanced > Special Window Settings, where you can
> check the Size checkbox, THEN click the drop down list that says Do
> Not Affect, where you can click on an item Force. NOW you can change
> the settings, which for my computer specified a height of 683 pixels,
> to something that is somewhere onscreen. Note that once you do this,
> after you click Apply, Click Ok in the Advanced Settings dialog, you
> must Quit and restart Scribus to check out your changes.
>
> This is not the total solution. What you will find in the dialog is
> that some tabs contain more lines of text than will fit in the newly
> shrunken dialog. In addition, no slider appears to allow access to the
> missing information. So in the General tab, you must reduce the size
> of the font, more specifically Font Size (Menus) so that everything
> fits in the dialog (I can manage 6-7 points). Click Apply and you see
> your result onscreen. I would add that changing the font size does not
> affect the dialog size, in case you wondered.
>
> Having gone through all this, my suspicion is that an alternative
> approach is somewhere in the bowels of Qt -- at least it seems
> sensible that Qt should be paying attention to my display settings. If
> I figure this out I will post an update.
>
> Greg


The required size of the prefs screen will be reduced in 1.5.0.

Craig