Quote:
Originally Posted by Purple Lady
I probably wouldn't use this, but why wouldn't you just have a maximum number of characters instead of line height? This is what you do with the author list. Maximum number of lines depends on a lot of different variables - font size, screen size, resolution.
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Two parts to the response: number of characters in authors and number of lines in the custom book list info.
Number of characters in authors:
I just went back over the discussions in the wish list about author length. Rather a tortured history.
The initial decision to use number of characters came about because at the time the series information was included on the "second" line, which is authors except when sorting by author. This made the computation of lines rather difficult.
The topic came up again after series got its own line. You and kaufman suggested interpreting the value as lines if it was less than 25, otherwise characters. I did a test implementation of this, and the performance was very slow so I dropped it.
Since then the custom information stuff was added to the book list. The first implementation made scrolling horrible so I completely redid how the book list information was computed. Because of this change I could easily do the "25 line" suggestion. So ...
Is "number of characters" what you really want for authors? Or would number of lines be better? Note: if number of lines then the last author name could be cut somewhere in the middle, something that doesn't happen today with the number of characters.
Number of lines in custom info boxes:
Controlling the length of info in the custom boxes as number of characters would be hard, primarily because a box can contain more than one information field. Should the number be per field in the box? Total length, even though some fields are short? Or something else? Making it a line count eliminates all of this, and is also easier to do.