Bug report: address book not presenting address field in 0.3.24

[docweathers]

When I try to "Add Address" to Sending of the address book the Name field appears but only the top half of the word Address appears below it. The text field does not show up at all.

I am using a Dell Studio XPS laptop with Win 7 sp1

Thanks Larry

[Maged]

Could we get a screen shot, by chance?

[docweathers]

I have a nice screen shot, but I cannot figure out how to send it on this forum. It does not do attachments and I cannot paste it in. Got an email address i can send it to?

[jackjack]

http://imageshack.us

[docweathers]

http://profile.imageshack.us/user/docweathers/


As an added note. If you enter a name and tab to the address field, you cannot see it, but if you enter something then click ok, the address does show up in the address field. So, the field is present, but hidden.

[docweathers]

BTW

Let me know if you need any more info on the problem.

Larry

[kjj]

Looks to me like you have unusual font sizes set.  Most likely the dialog isn't calculating the right size, just going with what would be right under default settings.

Here is a screenshot of my New Address dialog next to the screenshot of yours.

[docweathers]

how do I get the your new version?

[kjj]

how do I get the your new version?

I think I misphrased that.  It should have read:

Here is a screenshot of the stock standard 0.3.24 "Add Address" dialog" on a XP computer running the classic theme, next to your screenshot.

Yours would probably look fine if you switched to the default theme (or maybe classic, if there still is one), but the widget set should really be smart enough to recalculate the sizes needed by the dialogs even under arbitrary themes.

[docweathers]

I like my FF5 theme and would prefer not to switch. Will your fix become available? If so, how can I access it?

[kjj]

I don't have a fix, I'm using the standard client.  It just looks normal for me because I'm using the classic Windows theme.

[docweathers]

Does this thing use the Windows Explorer plugin for its browsing functions. If yes, my IE 9 uses the default theme.

[kjj]

Er, Windows UI stuff is complicated.  Actually, UI stuff in general is sorta complicated.

The short version, if I'm right, is that the bitcoin software is telling Windows that it needs a dialog box that is X pixels wide, and Y pixels high.  X and Y might be hard coded into the software, or it might be calculated based on the default theme, I don't know.  Once it has a handle (pointer) for that dialog box, it tells Windows to draw the labels (the texts "Name" and "Address"), input boxes, and buttons (with their own labels, "OK" and "Cancel").

The problem is that Windows is drawing these things using sizes chosen by your theme, and not using the sizes that the software is expecting, so it doesn't fit right any more, with most of it outside the viewable portion of the dialog box.

This is a simplification, of course.  Bitcoin actually talks to a generic UI library called vxWidgets, which then turns around and issues the commands to Windows.  They use it because the vxWidgets knows how to talk to Windows, GTK and MacOS, so the Bitcoin devs don't need to know how to use all of those systems, only the library.

I would fix this, or at least test my theory, but I don't actually know where any of the UI stuff is in the code.  And I know nothing about vxWidgets.  And I haven't done any Windows UI stuff in like 10 years, and I suspect that it has all changed.  Also, I wasn't very good at it even back then.

So, hopefully this thread now has enough information for a proper dev to find the problem and fix it.