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Properties editor rearranges columns poorly when very wide
Closed, ResolvedPublicTO DO

Description

System Information
Operating system: Windows 10 20H2
Graphics card: Nvidia RTX 3090

Blender Version
Broken: 2.92, 2.93
Worked: never

Short description of error
When the properties editor contains a large number of checkboxes in a section, Blender tries to fit them all on one line before the panel is wide enough to show the text properly.

This can be seen really well with the Fluid Domain settings for Border Collision. If the properties editor is a certain width (around 540 pixels), it shows 2 rows of 3 checkboxes each, which are all perfectly readable. If the editor is made 1 pixel wider, it puts all 6 on the same row resulting in one letter per checkbox.

Ideally, this layout change should not happen unless there is sufficient width to view the full text. This is a different use case than enabling the panel to gracefully scale down for small screens. In this case, we have plenty of screen real estate, and holding the 2-row layout a bit longer would be far better. See the attached screenshots as examples of the abrupt change.

The view at 540 pixels wide:

The view at 541 pixels wide:

Exact steps for others to reproduce the error

  1. Start with default scene
  2. Make the default cube into a fluid domain
  3. Scroll the properties panel so you can see the Border Collision section.
  4. Make your properties panel approximately 540 px wide (using default blender UI scaling) - this may vary between operating systems slightly. You should see 2 rows of 3 checkboxes each - all easily legible.
  5. Slowly increase the properties panel width, pixel by pixel.
  6. You will see it instantly snap to a 1-row layout, but with none of the text readable.

Event Timeline

Falk David (filedescriptor) changed the task status from Needs Triage to Confirmed.Mar 9 2021, 6:37 PM
Falk David (filedescriptor) triaged this task as Low priority.
Falk David (filedescriptor) added a project: Restricted Project.
Falk David (filedescriptor) changed the subtype of this task from "Report" to "To Do".

I can confirm this on the latest 2.93.0 Alpha, branch: master, commit date: 2021-03-04 06:43, hash: rBef7efc375197. I will mark this as a UI papercut for now.

For the record, here we have a property_split layout in each of the grid_flow columns.
So we get 40% of the empty space on the left. Plus the decorator on the right.
This is just not supported. The property_split should be used in a single-column layout.