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Size of Text Field

 
Ranch Hand
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Is it just me...aren't these message boxes to narrow? Is there anyway to increase the width of these text boxes? I'd like to see more of the text I am typing.
 
Trailboss
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I have many hours invested in trying, but I cannot find the code that sets the width.
This code says COLS=50, which does not occur in the source. I searched for every TEXTAREA and I have set most of them to COLS=70.
I followed the code to the point where editing happens and it does something that I don't understand: &LoadTemplate("public_new_reply_form"); This is the only place I can find in the code with "public_new_reply_form" ---- wait, I have an idea ...
 
paul wheaton
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How about that!
 
paul wheaton
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doing a test ...
 
paul wheaton
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Does everything appear to be working okay? Any new problems?
 
paul wheaton
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Oops! I made a small mistake but hope I've fixed it before anybody notices.
 
author and iconoclast
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Boxes are too wide now -- if you're using a browser with a sidebar (Mozilla), they're too wide for the 1024 pixel width of my laptop screen. Maybe you could split the difference?
 
paul wheaton
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I'm in 1024 by 768 mode right now. My browser is in full screen mode and everything appears to fit just perfectly.
How much "too wide" are you experiencing?
 
Ernest Friedman-Hill
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Mozilla has a "sidebar" on the left hand side of the window. It takes up about an inch, full height. Recent Internet Explorers seem to have one too (looking over my wife's shoulder at her *shudder* Windows XP machine.) If I hide the sidebar, then the text box fits perfectly on my screen. But with the sidebar showing, then the text box is about an inch too wide.
I can definitely live with it, and I probably wouldn't even mention it if it was just a Mozilla thing, but as I said IE seems to have it too. Anyway, if you don't change it, it's only one click to hide the sidebar in Mozilla. But since in IE it seems to always be populated with advertisements (!) I don't know if you can hide it at all.
 
mister krabs
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Sidebar on IE? Do you mean that area to the left where you can display search stuff or history or media? there should be an "x" to close it. it's also resizable. I have never seen it with ads, though?
 
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Hi all
The old textbox was working fine and was better. I view it on a 800*600 resolution and it doesn't looks as it used to be whenit was slimmer.
 
Anupam Sinha
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Forgot to mention please change it back.
 
paul wheaton
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Jim Yingst,
Any chance that monkeying with the smilies will give us some horizontal real estate?
 
Wanderer
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I don't think so. The bottom section (with "Instant Graemlins" and "Instant UBB Code") is independent from the "Post A Reply" area. If you resize your window, you can see the area occupied by the smilies grow and shrink relative to what's available, so the smilies take up 33% of the horizontal, while "Instant UBB Code" takes 67%. (Not counting edges.) Meanwhile the top area maintains a fixed width for the reply text area, 80 columns. The fundamental problem seems to be that in HTML, a textarea tag does not allow width to be specified in a relative manner they way you can for td elements. You need to specify an absolute width, as an integer number of columns. It seems that whatever value we pick, it will work better on some screen sizes than others. I'd think that hardcore HTML guys must have come up with an alternative, but I don't know what it is offhand. Maybe JavaScript allows some way to set the width more dynamically?
Hmmm... sites like yahoo nad hotmail have the same constant-width textareas. I take that to indicate there's probably no good alternative. They allow the width to be configurable from a user's account however. Which is probably more work than we'd want to do trying to hack UBB's scripts, involving a number of other files.
We could maybe make a little more horizontal width availabe by putting some line breaks in things like "UBB Code is enabled", freeing up space to the left of the text area. I'm guessing that will look weird though at higher screen widths.
Maybe we could revise the layout so that there isn't anything else at the same vertical level as the textarea. We could move
Message:
HTML is enabled.
UBB Code is enabled.
somewhere else, without too much trouble.
Incidentally I note that the for we now get for editing an old post still has a textarea with 50-column width, unlike the forms for posting replies or new posts. I assume we'll want to make the edits the same width as the others. Though we might as well wait until we figure our what size we really want...
[ July 28, 2003: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]
 
paul wheaton
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It does seem that the long term solution is to allow people to specify width.
The old width was definitely way too narrow. I could give up some of the new width to make things smoother for people with 800x600. I have it currently set to 80 columns ... 70?
 
paul wheaton
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I'm in 800x600 right now. It looks pretty much okay .... just a little too wide. Tinkering .... 77 looks okay. 76 looks better.
I'll bump it down to 76.
 
paul wheaton
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Okay, how's that? Better?
 
"The Hood"
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Looks great for me in IE at 1024 X 768!
Thanks!!
 
Anupam Sinha
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Hi all
That's better than the previous setting. Thanks for the change. I certainly agree with Jim that HTML is enabled. UBB Code is enabled can be shifted somewhere else. Probably next to the "Add reply" button or just above the textarea.
 
Shannon Sims
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Ahhhh...much better, Paul!!! Now I can see much more of my code when I paste it.
Thanks Paul!
 
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