Text orientation in vertical panels

[Simon Steinbeiß]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:42:48 +0900
Andrzej <ndrwrdck at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> 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 guess I'd use the deskbar or hide the Window-Button-labels entirely (which is what I do at the moment). But yeah, this (i.e. hiding labels) doesn't work in all cases. Nevertheless I think rotated text is pretty much always a bit hard to read.

> 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.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> 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.

For me (being a simple user) the main point of rotated text is to save screen estate, because the panel can get really wide in no time.
The row-option in your panel seems like a nice way to cope with having a vertical panel and only one-icon-per-row.

About your four proposals: not sure I understood them correctly, if you have the time to combine them with screenshots or mockups I guess it might be easier to follow.

All the best
Simon