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Use a JSplitPane for the description area
The code you just checked in actually makes things worse, IMHO. There is now a (big fat ugly!) split pane, but scrolling does not seem to work any longer. Now you can pull the split pane down as far as possible without truncating the currently displayed description; if you select a new node with a longer description, it will just be chopped off (with no visual indication) and in order to see the rest of it you need to resize the description area (which you then need to undo if it is larger than you normally want it). Of course there is no way to do the resizing from the KB that I can see, whereas (at least if some other bugs were fixed) text could be scrolled from the KB. Given that most node descriptions fit in one line, most of the remainder in two, and rather few really need three or more lines, what is the benefit in using up some of the vertical space making it resizable?
I agree the splitter not an improvement. Re the scrolling, the HIE folks asked me to remove the scrolling code you contributed. You can right click and turn off Show Description Area on the context menu for the sheet, fwiw.
Dusan, I tend to agree that anything providing a > 2 line short description is not providing a *short* description, and they should be less verbose. The splitter is ugly and cumbersome; I think we should reconsider the resizability, and maybe just provide a default size of three lines for the description, and include the full text in the description's tooltip.
Note that anything exceeding two lines in the property sheet is not going to fit comfortably into a tooltip on a modest-sized screen (e.g. laptop) anyway. Short descriptions longer than that are just not usable. I originally tried the two-line default after just browsing around various kinds of nodes I could find - I could find almost none that actually exceeded that limit, so it seemed a reasonable compromise. (Adding more lines cuts into the displayable property rows on a small display and wastes usable space.) Note that I have a laptop so the propsheet is not very wide and two lines is not a huge amount of space. Getting the best default is going to be a matter of experimentation I think. Default font size will also of course affect how much you want to see by default.
Okay, I've got it to where the splitter's pretty unobtrusive and there's no random resizing.