Fontsize vs. layouts and windowsizes

Hello

This is just a reminder, but I'm completely totally sure these things must be 
thought out at some point of Y development.

In the distant past, I used for many years an old System 6 and System 7 Apple 
Macintosh.  There, when windows and dialog boxes appeared, the widgets were 
always all visible and nicely arranged.  Because those old systems had only 
three default fonts (Chicago, Geneva, Monaco) and only one, at only one size, 
was used for the widgets, this must have been easy, and the programmer and 
designer could do the arranging once and for all.

Micro$oft Windows has also done fine with this.  I don't know how they do it, 
because they have a variable dpi setting.  But in old BeOS this was a 
disaster.  All widget sizes used fixed arrangement, and their sizes were 
chosen for size 9 font.  This was painful with a big screen and large 
resolution, so I changed the text size to 12, because BeOS had a control 
panel for that.  This resulted in the text being too large for the widgets, 
and it simply got clipped where it didn't fit.

Tried Gnome, and version 2.4.4 gtk does fine.  I could even change widget 
fonts on-the-fly, and it made no mistakes resizing everyting.  Only one label 
didn't get repainted in the "font preferences" window.

I don't remember where I have seen this, but I know for sure that I have.  
Imagine a "You are about to do something dangerous, do you wanna proceed or 
cancel?" modal dialog, where the toolkit uses a default size for the window 
that is provided by the programmer.  Now, the user has changed the font size, 
the text doesn't fit and the window has a horizontal scrollbar.  I find this 
totally lame.

Two possible solutions include, first, creating the window with enough size to 
have the whole label visible, not of course exceeding screen boundaries.  
Another is to have the label wrapped to multiple lines.  Maybe a flag to 
indicate if wrapping is allowed.

Then, do these windows have a minimum size?  Should it be provided by the 
programmer or by the toolkit?  Should the default size be provided by the 
programmer, or calculated on-the-fly by the toolkit?  Default size is how the 
window first appears.  Third, should the maximum size be the screen 
resolution, or provided by the programmer, or calculated by the toolkit to 
see that everything fits nicely?  Or a combination of these?

It was not long ago that I opened the KDE image viewing application, and the 
window appeared some 20 pixels wide, and the height was 10 pixels plus the 
titlebar.  The image I had opened was 1280x1024, and was there after I 
resized the window.

-Kimmo S.

PS. Which versions of autotools do you use?