yaddemo

YAD Dialog Formatting

There is nothing in this guide that cannot be easily discovered with some experimentation, but showing some examples will save some time.

Centering the Dialog

It is easier for the user to find the dialog if it’s always in the same place. Using the --center option directs YAD to create the new dialog in the center of the window.

• main -> YAD Dialog Formatting -> YAD Centered

Dialog Width

The width of a dialog is, initially, determined by the width of certain elements of the dialog. YAD will stretch the dialog to contain the dialog buttons and the dialog text (set with the --text option). There is also an option, --width that can be used to set a minimum width in case the buttons or the text are missing or too short to result in a pleasing format.

One option that does not affect the dialog width is the --title option, which sets the caption bar text. Instead, the title will be truncated to fit if the dialog is not wide enough to contain the title.

At least two things (I may be missing others) determine the width of a dialog, the --width option and the --text option. The --width option is works as expected, but the --text was a surprise, coming from HTML development.

The dialog will expand horizontally to contain the contents of the --text option. If the text is set to a very long string without any newlines, the dialog will be rendered wide enough to contain the text.

The --width option overrides the text width, so a single long line of text will be broken to fit within the width request.

Find the examples of a long text option, with and without incorporated newlines, at

• main -> YAD Dialog Formatting -> YAD Too Long, and
• main -> YAD Dialog Formatting -> YAD Width-restrained Too Long, and
• main -> YAD Dialog Formatting -> YAD Just Right.

Dialog Height

For some reason, when the --text option string is very long, the YAD dialog gets very tall, many times taller than necessary to contain the text. Even setting the --height fails to overcome this unfortunate formatting problem.

Setting the --fixed option seems to help with this. With a long --text string, setting --fixed will honor the --height option, or simple size the dialog to fit the long text.

YAD Borders

I had expected the --borders option to create a thick border around the dialog, but, instead, the --borders option creates space between the dialog’s border and its contents. It behaves like the CSS padding property.

Find an example of the formatted text dialog with borders to make a nicer dialog:

• main -> YAD Dialog Formatting -> YAD Just Right and Loosened