kicad/Documentation/guidelines/UIpolicies.txt

** General UI Guidelines for KICAD Development


Capitalization:  

    For any visible text used within Kicad, follow recommendations here:
    http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/2.20/design-text-labels.html.en#layout-capitalization
    This applies to all Menus, Titles, Labels, Tooltips, Buttons, etc.


Dialogs:  

    Follow the recommendations here:
    http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/2.20/windows-dialog.html.en
    paying particular attention to "initial focus", "sensible default values",
    "default buttons", ESC key termination.
    
    Use wxWidgets "sizers" in all dialogs, no matter how simple they are: 
    http://zetcode.com/tutorials/wxwidgetstutorial/layoutmanagement
    and keep dialogs resizeable.
    
    Configure the sizers so that as the dialog window is expanded, the most
    sensible use of the increased dialog window occurs automatically by the
    sizers. For example, in the DRC dialog of PCBNEW, sizers should be used to
    expand the text control to use the full available free window area, so that
    the user's view of the items in the text control is maximized as he/she
    expands the dialog window, making it easier to read more DRC error messages.
    In other dialogs without one component more important than the others, the
    sizers might be configured to position the controls to sensible positions
    near the perimeter of the increasingly larger dialog box, not necesarily
    leaving them all bundled tightly together.  The dialog box should look 
    nice at any size large enough to show all the components.
    
    Use tooltips to explain the functionality of each non-obvious control.  
    This is important because the help files and the wiki often lag behind
    the source code.