Overlap with extreme stringTest

[elisemorgan]

Test device: Mac

Operating System: 10.8.5

Browser: Safari 6.2.6

Problem description: Parts of the layout overlap in the Intro screen when the Extremely Long String test is performed.

Steps to reproduce: Run Long string. Go to Intro screen and select to display two springs.

Severity:

Screenshots:

Normal:

Troubleshooting information (do not edit): Name: SomeExtremelyLongStringThatWouldLikelyBreakAnythingDidNot URL: http://www.colorado.edu/physics/phet/dev/html/hookes-law/1.0.0-dev.29/hookes-law_en.html?stringTest=SomeExtremelyLongStringThatWouldLikelyBreakAnythingDidNot Version: 1.0.0-dev.29 2015-09-02 17:09:44 UTC Features missing: touch User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5) AppleWebKit/600.6.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.2.6 Safari/537.85.15 Language: en-us Window: 1122x548 Pixel Ratio: 1/1 WebGL: WebGL 1.0 (2.1 INTEL-8.16.74) GLSL: WebGL GLSL ES 1.0 (1.20) Vendor: WebKit (WebKit WebGL) Vertex: attribs: 16 varying: 15 uniform: 1024 Texture: size: 4096 imageUnits: 16 (vertex: 16, combined: 16) Max viewport: 8192x8192 OES_texture_float: true Dependencies JSON: {"assert":{"sha":"858e65ac","branch":"master"},"axon":{"sha":"1db622f9","branch":"master"},"babel":{"sha":"696f7588","branch":"master"},"brand":{"sha":"f2c42d7b","branch":"master"},"chipper":{"sha":"e0747524","branch":"master"},"dot":{"sha":"e34c6b2c","branch":"master"},"hookes-law":{"sha":"12486758","branch":"master"},"joist":{"sha":"27d92033","branch":"master"},"kite":{"sha":"24978146","branch":"master"},"phet-core":{"sha":"8e31808c","branch":"master"},"phetcommon":{"sha":"3cebb2ae","branch":"master"},"scenery":{"sha":"7379d318","branch":"master"},"scenery-phet":{"sha":"b05ed319","branch":"master"},"sherpa":{"sha":"1759eade","branch":"master"},"sun":{"sha":"9dbeaf88","branch":"master"}}

[pixelzoom]

@ariel-phet Perhaps I'm not clear on the requirements for i18n testing. I thought the requirement was to make sure the layout looked OK for 'stringTest=double', which I believe it does. This particular case is very unlikely, but I guess you want me to spend time on it, since you assigned it to me.

[ariel-phet]

@pixelzoom - I think for i18n testing @samreid had suggested the "extremely long string test to see if anything was not revealed" much like the extremely short string test. Shouldn't things scale down if the strings get very long, or at least not cause this odd overlap?

Happy to punt if you think it is not worth it.

[pixelzoom]

This is a general problem with PhET's current methodology of applying the 'stringTest' query parameter to all strings, as detailed in https://github.com/phetsims/chipper/issues/336.

In the case reported here, value readouts like '0 N' are converted to extremely long strings. That will never happen, and isn't something we should have to address in layout code. But the way that the stringTest query parameter is applied causes this to happen, and possibly masks legitimate issues. We'll discuss the general issue at a developer meeting.

In the meantime... To address this specific issue, I've limited the width of all value displays. Here's a sample screenshot:

[samreid]

In the case reported here, value readouts like '0 N' are converted to extremely long strings. That will never happen

Perhaps stringTest=double is a better standard for testing?

[pixelzoom]

Perhaps stringTest=double is a better standard for testing?

That's what I thought the standard was, see https://github.com/phetsims/hookes-law/issues/22#issuecomment-137599016.

To be discussed in phetsims/chipper#336.

Re-closing this issue.