Currently dialogs in OOo have no layout manager, so are of fixed size. Contained controls such as labels and buttons are also of fixed size, and because of variable length of translated strings are of the maximum width of the longest translated string. Which is why there is so much white space in the dialogs. One solution was suggested as OOoCon by ssa to use XUL for dialogs, reimplementing them in XUL, pulling in the mozilla XUL implementation, and redoing the dialog logic in javascript and moving into the dialogs. Which is worthy, but a long term kind of thing.
After talking to alex, an alternative using something like springlayout looked like it could be retro-fitted to OOo’s dialogs without too much effort, and done in an incremental fashion without having to re-implement each dialog.
So here’s that proposed solution to dialog layout in OOo. implementation, and some screenshots, starting size and expanded size. Adding a relatively trivial preferred size for controls to get the minimum size of a control required to show its full contents would round things out to de-ugly the layed-out controls.
