Text orientation in vertical panels

[Andrzej]

On 11/22/2011 08:08 PM, Simon Steinbeiß wrote:
>
> Personally I think that if you rotate the panel to vertical mode it might make sense to have the text orientated as in your screenshot when it's at the left screen-edge and top-down when on the right screen-edge.
> If that seems a bit too much just for text-orientation I'd rather go with your text-orientation than with the current one (maybe because my panel rather tends to be on the left screen-edge than on the right :) ).

I see, thanks. Out of curiosity, do you prefer the rotated panel or the 
deskbar as in the screenshot at the bottom of the page?

I'm not sure if hardwiring orientation of labels to the position on the 
screen is a good solution (I, for one, would prefer having text rotated 
counter clockwise in all situations). But we could very easily make it 
configurable.

The real cost is in implementing all these cases. Plug-in writers would 
have to be aware of all 4 different panel modes (horizontal, deskbar and 
two rotated vertical) and that's getting messy.

For the sake of completeness, if we implemented all of them we'd have to 
deal with the following panel layouts (think of plug-in ordering and 
text orientation):

1. horizontal (horizontal labels) (4.8, multiple row option in my repo)
| .| .| .|
|. |. |. v  AAA    ("AAA" denotes a label orientation)


2. vertical deskbar (horizontal labels) (in my repo)
--
  .
.
--  AAA
  .
.
->


3. vertical (labels rotated counter clockwise) (in my repo)
->
.    <
  .   <
--   <
.
  .
--


4. vertical (labels rotated clockwise) (similar to 4.8, shown on the 
right, but with opposite horizontal direction)
--                --
.    >             .   >   (this is 4.8)
  .   >            .    >
--   >            --   >
.                  .
  .                .
<-                ->

The existing rotated vertical panel doesn't really fit any of the above 
and its functionality is mostly replaced with the deskbar mode, so in my 
opinion we should either fix it (if so, which way? 3? 4? 3+4?), remove 
it or keep it as an obsolete option.

> Just my 2cents,

Thanks a lot!

Andrzej