Re: [Pan-users] Gray threading background for one particular newsgroup.

[Duncan]

Christian Dysthe posted on Wed, 16 Jul 2014 08:27:56 -0500 as excerpted:

> I have built successfully against gtk3 and Pan works except for one
> thing: When I scroll through a newsgroup suddenly the whole window
> resizes seemingly by opening certain messages. The window suddenly gets
> much wider. I have to reset it to preferred width, but it resizes again
> later when I hit one of those "trigger messages". I do not think I have
> the skills to determine why a certain message causes this resize

I'd guess it's one of two things, either (1) a charset issue like the 
below, possibly due to multi-byte characters being considered multiple 
single one-byte characters so it expands to accommodate the extra 
horizontal space it thinks it'll need, or (2) an effect of the old 1000-
character-per-line (998 plus terminating CRLF sequence) limit, where 
autowrapping is intended to deal with the displayed line length, but 
which gtk3 might not account for, in which case it could try to expand 
horizontally to accommodate display of 1000 characters wide messages.

I'm sure there's ways around either of those, but so far none of the 
coders that have worked with pan since Charles lost interest have been 
sufficiently interested in the gtk3 port side of things to worry about 
fixing the various little bugs it seems to have, including that one.

Tho FWIW, I'm running a kde desktop with kwin as window manager here, and 
kwin has what's called window rules that a user can setup to apply to 
specific windows, that can be configured to force various properties, 
window size and position included.  If I had a window misbehaving in that 
manner, I'd simply set a window rule and let kwin enforce it.

In fact, I actually have a pan window rule that /does/ set pan window 
size and position, tho it's set to "apply initially", not force.  If you 
take a look at the screenshot link I posted, you'll see it in action, as 
it forces an "almost-maximized" vertically window, maximized 
horizontally, and positioned to the bottom of the monitor.  Thus the 
narrow gap at the top of the window, just tall enough so the titlebar of 
an underlying window can show above the pan window.  With focus-follows-
mouse and click-to-focus plus kwin configured transparency, that gives me 
access to three windows, two half-width full height, one full-width 
almost-full-height, at the same time, all in the same monitor.

Which is very convenient for a three-pan messages client like pan for 
news or claws-mail for mail and feeds, since I can make the three-pane 
main window the full-width almost-full-height window, with pan's reply 
window being one of the half-width windows and either a browser or 
terminal window for reference being the other half-width window.  The 
transparency, focus-follows-mouse and click-to-focus then lets me type 
into the pan reply window, while still being able to read both it and the 
pan main window above it, along with the reference window (browser or 
terminal) in the other half of the screen.

That's typically in the bottom monitor.  The top monitor is of course the 
system performance and log readouts, which still leaves the middle 
monitor entirely free.  I'll typically use it either for two additional 
half-width reference windows, giving me access to three reference windows 
plus the reply window and main pan window (and system performance monitor 
and log readout on the top monitor, of course) at the same time, or for a 
full-screen movie or minitube (youtube client) player.  Playing youtube 
full-screen at 42-inches (and playing thru my 5.1 home audio system) 
while still working in the three windows on another 42-inch monitor 
below, all while still having the system performance monitors and logging 
still uninterrupted visible on the smaller third monitor actually off to 
the side, is a very nice computing experience indeed. =:^)

... OK, that got a bit off topic, but eh, I like it, and it does explain 
why I have a pan window rule configured to set the pan main-window to 
1920x1060, full-width, almost-full-height.  As I said I only have it set 
to "apply initially", but if pan was misbehaving, I could set it to force 
if i had to.

>> Charset!  That might actually be it!  Might there be some post in that
>> group with a strange charset used in either the subject or author
>> header?  Since the threading indention is in the subject column, that
>> would be the strongest candidate.

> And there it is! There was a post with on of those white vertical
> rectangles indicating a character that couldn't be rendered. I removed
> that post and restarted pan. Problem solved!

=:^)  Sometimes those 1/3 part each of intuition, experience, and shot-in-
the-dark, meandering guess replies, actually pay off. =:^)

Tho I did have some similar strange-character issue at one point in the 
past, but it had other symptoms, IIRC the post cut-off in mid-sentence 
immediately after the strange character, in that case a non-wrap-space 
IIRC.  So the symptoms were different, but once I got to charsets I 
remembered that problem, and decided it might be a similar charset bug, 
just triggering different symptoms.  And so it was! =:^)

Anyway, glad the fix was that simple. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman