Control's Resizing, Without making the form layout unpresentable

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Shahzad Atta - 04 Mar 2005 11:06 GMT

Hi All,

I am working on internationalizing my app. I have all the resources and
structure in place but I am unable to figure out the best way to handle
control resizing in order to accommodate localized strings which are larger
then the English version.

One way to do this is to provide ample room in the controls but that's make
my form in English look unpresentable.
Another way is to dynamically handle the size of control but that seems a
bit tricky. The size of string in not known until runtime. what would be the
limit. Controls overlapping and those sort of issues.

So any idea, best practice I can follow to get things done. I greatly
appreciate any idea being posted.

Regards,
Shahzad Atta

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Mihai N. - 05 Mar 2005 05:36 GMT

> One way to do this is to provide ample room in the controls but that's make
> my form in English look unpresentable.
> Another way is to dynamically handle the size of control but that seems a
> bit tricky. The size of string in not known until runtime. what would be the
> limit. Controls overlapping and those sort of issues.

100% right.

Dialogs are resized after translation. This is why the .rc files
are considered localizable and store dialog coordinates.
Otherwise you would just localize a .txt file with pairs id-string.
It is impossible to design a dialog that is good enough for 20 languages
and looks good in any of them.

Best idea is to provide ample room, but without making the original
language look bad:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/getwr/steps/wrg_uiloc.mspx

This will make resizing the localized versions way easier,
but will not eliminate the need or resizing.

To help for future versions, many professional localization tools
are able to leverage more than text from one version to another.
They can handle coordinate information, bitmaps, fonts, icons, etc.

Just take care not to change every single dialog from one
version to the next :-)

Another option is to use some smart auto-layout system.
Many tried, and many failed :-)
It is possible, but it is a lot of work and you should
expect a lot of troubles until it is fine tuned well enough
to be good for any language.

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Mihai Nita [Microsoft MVP, Windows - SDK]
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Marin Millar - 22 Mar 2005 19:33 GMT

Yes, as Mihai mentions, in version 1.0 and 1.1, the best way is to use a
localization tool or the VS designer for resizing localized controls.
However, in our next version (VS 2005), we do have some controls which help
with automatic resizing according to text size. If you're interested, take
a look at VS Beta 2, to be release sometime in April. The controls which
are interesting for this scenario are TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel.
Marin Millar [MSFT]

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Control's Resizing, Without making the form layout unpresentable

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