I understand that the boxes in Graph View are supposed automatically to fit the text
width. But in my case it seems not to work very well. I suspect it it would be a more economical use of space, make it easier to navigate and even give the image an improved aesthetical feel if the boxes really took up only the space needed by the text to be displayed. I use the Graph View a lot and like it very much.
I am using Gramps 5.1.3 with SQLite and graphview 1.0.123. on OpenSuse Linux Leap 15.2,
As you can see from this screen shot the boxes are about double the width needed for the text, although Graph View is configured only to show full dates, but not images or avatars.
In the meantime, I have discovered the error (mine). It seems that my Gramps was installed with default GraphView font ‘none’. On choosing a font from the list provided under > Configure > Themes the box sizes were all adjusted to the text as expected and desired.
I wrote the code that attempts to adapt to text size. It turns out that it is not possible to accurately adapt to all combinations of fonts, bold etc., because the GraphViz library/tool that we use only has font size tables for two types of font. So my code attempts to deal with this by experimentally sending a couple of text strings through GraphViz at startup, and measuring the size of boxes needed. If all the text used those exact text strings, it would work perfectly… But of course this is not the case.
You might try a couple of different fonts and see if the fit was more to your liking. On my Windows system, Dejavu Sans seems to be a bit better than Noto Sans, for instance.
It seems like this might a good cross-post to the GraphViz Discourse forum. The posts there indicate their system has its own set of quirks with all sorts of data-fitting workarounds.
