Long page names are truncated with no indication

The horizontal scrollbar does not work ? Please add a screenshot.

The horizontal scrollbar works, but when I am looking at the page name I am not looking for a scrollbar. Also, in many instances it is not obvious that the particular line one is looking at has a continuation. The scrollbar could be caused by any one of the page names.

For instance, a page named "Chicken recipes with cumin" that has the last two letters truncated would have a very different meaning, yet it would not be obvious that something was missing.

I kind of expect users to be familiar with the concept of scrollbars. No other programs I know of show continuation characters when part of a widget scrolls out of view. Also technically this will be quite difficult to implement since the scrolled window and the treeview embedded in that window are separate widgets.

I think this will be a "won't fix".

I am familiar with the concept of scrollbars but the fact that there is a scrollbar does not mean that the user will move the scrollbar for each and every Page Title just to see if there is more to it. Like I mentioned earlier, often it is not so obvious. In languages where a single letter changes the meaning of a word (My native language uses words that rarely go above five letters) this can easily go unnoticed. I understand that in English and other Latin-based languages every word is very long and distinctive even when only part of the word is visible. Semetic and Asian languages do not have this quality, and when part of the word is missing it is critical to make that obvious.

I checked two other programs that have tree views: Basket and Thunderbird. Basket adds an ellipsis character at the end of truncated words, so "Fishing" becomes "Fish…" and Thunderbird adds the ellipsis character in the middle, so "Fishing" becomes "Fi…ng". Either method is acceptable however truncating sentences with no indication _at_the_sentence_itself_ is detrimental to Semetic and Asian sentences. Just displaying a scrollbar is not a solution in these cases.

I see your point. Unfortunately it seems quite difficult to implement at
this moment. Probably need to design a custom treeview widget to make
this work. Not impossible, but low on the impact / effort ratio from my
point of view.

Will keep this as an open issue.

> Probably need to design a custom treeview widget to make
> this work.

Really? I did not realize that it would be so involved because other GTK apps have this feature. I just checked Evolution and I see that it has the same behaviour as Basket: shortened names have an ellipsis added at the end. Could the Evolution component possibly be used in Zim? I really don't know enough about GTK development to know how involved it would be, but judging by the fact that most applications that I am familiar with display this behaviour I assumed that it is built into GTK.

Ok, turns out I was using the wrong key words when looking for this option. Once I got the proper example it turned out to be a very simple 2-line patch. Committed to trunk (sync in ~1hour). I now set ellipsize at the end because that seems most natural to me.

@dotan: thanks for your persistence ;)

You're thanking me?!? Thank _you_ for looking into this issue and for the dedication to making Zim the terrific application that it is. It is your persistence and dedication to Zim that is making it better, not my whining and crying every time I see something that I don't like :)

Well, I know how painful it can be to get a opensource developer make that one small tweak...

Fixed in 0.28