From: Ray Lambert <codemonkey_at_interthingy.net>
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 12:34:27 -0400

XavierGr wrote:
> Path FS#9455 has stirred up some discussion on IRC which led to a dead end.
>
> Currently, forward-scrolling (bidirectional scrolling isn't a matter) in
> Rockbox pads exactly 3 spaces at the end of the string, to differentiate
> between the last and first letters of the string.
> Personally, I was quite annoyed by this small gap (especially in the car),
> and made a patch to increase it. For me it is a usability problem. ...
>
FWIW: I submitted a patch a couple of years ago in which I changed this
and also implemented a third type of scrolling which I feel is superior
(especially for use in the car).

I changed the spacing to an ellipsis ( ... ) which seems to me to be the
most sensible. So the display would look something like:

    emains The Same ... The S

The new form of scrolling that I implemented was called "jump back"
scrolling. The way it works is like this: scroll to the end; stop;
delay; jump back to the start; delay; start over.

I found this to be much easier to read, etc. The text only scrolls in
one direction (backwards scrolling in the car, for example, is not very
useful, IMO) and you no longer have to try to identify when the text is
repeating (which can also be very distracting in the car).

My patch, unfortunately, is quite old now and I don't even know if it's
still on the tracker. Also, I believe the display sub-system has been
re-written since I wrote my patch. So jump-back would probably have to
be re-written. (But it's not all that hard to write anyway.)

So my suggestion would be to pursue something like this rather than
adding new prefs to define separator strings and the like.

~ray
Received on 2008-10-26