Text field alignments

[Donald Allen]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Tommy Trussell
<tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Donald Allen <donaldcallen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
>> > Charles Day <cedayiv at gmail.com> writes:
>> >
>> >> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 10:44 AM, Fred Bone <Fred.Bone at dial.pipex.com>wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> When viewing a register in "Basic Ledger" view, the "other-account" names
>> >>> in the "Transfer" column are right-justified. So if the complete account
>> >>> name is too long to fit, the high-end ("Assets", for example) is cut.
>> >>>
>> >>> However, in a "Split" view, the corresponding text in each split is left-
>> >>> justified - except when that part of that split is selected. This means
>> >>> that, for example, I see
>> >>>  "Assets:Current Assets:Savings Accounts:"
>> >>> and have to select the entry to see *which* savings account it is.
>> >>>
>> >>> Is there any particular reason for this behaviour?
>> >>>
>> >>
>> >> I don't know, but if no one responds with a particular reason for leaving it
>> >> alone, I will go ahead and change it to be right-justified.
>> >
>> > I have no idea why it is the way it is; I think changing it is fine.
>>
>> I'd suggest changing both to left-justified. Without doing anything,
>> I'd rather see the high-order bits, the part of the path closest to
>> the root of the account tree. I frequently have multiple leaf accounts
>> with the same name, e.g., investments in the same mutual fund or stock
>> in, say, my IRA and my wife's IRA.
>
>  Interesting situation, but I think this would NOT be a typical case,
> and your situation would be easily addressed by adding a bit of
> redundancy to the account name. (You could add the appropriate
> initials to them, for example).

I (obviously) disagree. For example, you have multiple accounts
(individual IRAs plus taxable accounts) at a big mutual fund company
like Vanguard and each of them has holdings in, say, "Prime Money
Market", a common situation. Cluttering the leaf accounts with
initials, as you suggest, strikes me as kludgery to work around
something that isn't fundamentally sound (you don't do this with
identical filenames in different directories, or identical variable
names in different scopes).  I could make some programming-language
analogies here, but I'll refrain from doing so for fear of setting off
an irrelevant religious war :-)

/Don


>