Hi Friends, especially ~suv
I think this is a "software issue" but not sure enough to post in that forum, without confirmation.

I have 2 dialogs open and docked -- Layers and Fill/Stroke. The Layers dialog is on top and the F/S dialog is below. In order to see all my layers, I have to stretch the dialog downward, pushing the F/S dialog further down. For some reason, when I do screen shots, my cursor doesn't show up. So I'll describe it. When I hover it over the line marking the bottom edge of the Layers dialog, and upper edge of the F/S dialog, it's 2 thin, parallel, horizontal lines, with a tiny arrow pointing upward, on top of the top line, and a bottom-pointing arrow below the bottom line. Then if I click and drag down, it makes the layers dialog longer, so I can see all the layers.

Now for the F/S dialog, I have the Stroke Style tab open, so I can adjust stroke widths. Whenever I click to adjust the stroke width, the Layers dialog jumps back to, I guess a default size. This wasn't happening in 0.47. I could simply do 3 clicks and adjust a stroke width, and the Layers dialog didn't change. Now, when I do 3 clicks (for example), the first one does reduce the stroke width by 0.100, but the 2nd and 3rd clicks end up activating something below the stroke width, like changing my path to dashes, or setting a marker.

Thus, I'm continually readjusting the docked Layers dialog, which as I said, didn't happen in 0.47. Any hope of getting this fixed by posting a bug, or is it not really a bug? I have not checked if a similar thing happens with other docked dialogs, because I wasn't using any others at the time I upgraded to 0.48, so I would not be able to compare this behavior back to 0.47. But after I post this, I will test other docked dialogs, and report back if others are affected.

Thanks for your help

Edit - Also happens with Transform dialog, but not Undo History.

Tested and reproduced with both Inkscape 0.46, 0.47 and 0.48:

The behavior (resizing the stretched layers dialog) is triggered if the clicks are fast enough to count as double-click - if you pause a little bit between the clicks, the layer dialog stays unchanged. What exactly is happening I do not know, nor if this is intended behavior (of the GTK+ toolkit used for the GUI) or can be changed in Inkscape's code.

I'll search if I can find anything related in the bug tracker or the mailing list.

[update]
Another odd thing happens when the upper dialog (e.g. Layers, or Transform) is vertically stretched and the vertical scrollbar of the dock itself is visible:
Click once on an empty part of the stroke style tab - both dialogs seem to collapse to some default or minimal height (the lower blur and opacity controls overlap the area of the tab). Click once again on an empty part of the stroke style tab and the fill&stroke dialog switches back to the previous height (the upper dialog stays small).
[/update]

Thanks ~suv

The behavior (resizing the stretched layers dialog) is triggered if the clicks are fast enough to count as double-click - if you pause a little bit between the clicks, the layer dialog stays unchanged.

Yes, I just discovered this too. But unlike you, it did not happen for me with 0.47. I'm on Windows 7, 64-bit, btw.

There are a couple of other areas of Inkscape (can't remember them at the moment, but it happens on the canvas) where if you click quickly, undesired things happen. This makes me think it's probably by design....although I don't know what purpose it serves in this case.

And I've noticed a related anomaly. Here's a combination of screen shots. On the left is the Layers dialog stretched out. If you click just once in any open area of the Stroke Style tab, like where the pink square is, I get the image on the right. Not only does the Layers dialog snap back up, the F/S dialog gets funky (scrunched and jumbled). Another click on the F/S dialog restores it to normal. The same happens to Transform dialog.



While we're on the subject, and while I'm testing different docked dialogs, I notice that I cannot seem to get the Layers dialog to stay on top. For example, the Align and Distribute dialog, as well as the Rows and Columns dialog will only open above the Layers dialog. It's tricky enough to get the Layers dialog on top of the F/S dialog, but I CAN do it. Can also get it to be on top of the Transform dialog. But so far, I can't get it to be on top of any other dialogs (although I haven't tested them all yet). I'm guessing this is by design, but really have no idea Hhhmmm, maybe if I only have 2 dialogs open at a time.....I'll try that next.

Edit -- Oops, I missed your update. But I don't think the scrunching up/jumbling of the lower dialog happens for you. So in any case, these are just some images of this problem.

brynn wrote:Edit -- Oops, I missed your update. But I don't think the scrunching up/jumbling of the lower dialog happens for you. So in any case, these are just some images of this problem.

I get that too, in all Inkscape versions I have installed (0.46, 0.47, 0.48, 0.48+devel r9725 on Mac OS X 10.5.8).

Screenshot with Inkscape 0.46: