Text orientation in vertical panels

[Andrzej]

On 06/01/2012 16:43, TTran wrote:
>
> I for one would love to have a vertical mode that display text legibly. Like
> most monitors now, mine has more room to spare horizontally than vertically.  I
> would love to use that extra horizontal space for a panel.

The "deskbar mode", which does exactly that, has landed in the 
development 4.9.0 version of the xfce4-panel. The chances are it will 
appear in the stable release as well.

It's already fairly usable with most core plugins supported. But then 
some plugins (especially third-party ones) may need some tweaks in order 
to look nice in this mode.

If you could start using it and report back any usability issues you 
find that would be great.

> When I was using 10.10, I resorted to xfapplet to display gnome applets, most
> (if not all) of which rotate the labels in vertical mode correctly.  In 11.10, I
> cannot get xapplet to work anymore, and the vertical panel is very difficult to
> use, especially since quite a few of the core panel items use text.

I can't speak for xfapplet, but there were some comments earlier in the 
xfce ml, which indicate that xfapplet may go away because of G3 
compatibility issues and a general trend toward Gnome Shell (and away 
from panels and applets).

 From my own experience, xfce panel in deskbar mode is already more 
usable than gnome panel ever was in the vertical mode.

> In any case a native xfce-panel support for vertical mode would be most
> desirable I think.  Otherwise why offer a vertical mode where the text isn't
> displayed fully/legibly.

We have decided to keep the original vertical mode as well (even with 
some of its design issues). In some use cases it makes a perfect sense 
to have *a* narrow vertical panel with text oriented vertically.

Otherwise, I expect the new deskbar mode will be more usable for most 
users than the vertical mode. Especially on wide screen displays.

Thanks,

Andrzej