Text does not always look fitted in reply widgets

[sssoleileraaa]

Description

The client uses a QScrollArea for displaying a conversation between a source and journalist(s). The scroll area can be resized along with the client window, and #1206 makes each QLabel containing message/ reply text inside the scroll area resizable.

We would like to rely on the GUI framework to handle basic layout scaling, but our workaround to #815 has made this a challenge. Our workaround was to set a fixed width to our QLabel container widgets, so #1206 introduces logic that updates these fixed widths whenever the scroll area resizes. In general this works, but when the QLabel widget contains larger and larger amounts of text (we will display up to 100K characters for each message), you will start to see lag and extra space around the QLabel text as the container is resized.

This looks fine:

This also looks fine:

This doesn't look fine (there's some extra white space above the text of the fourth speech bubble):

At this point, I'm interested in revisiting QPlainTextEdit instead of QLabel (see #815 to learn about our previous attempt at doing this) because now we are not relying on the framework so we may no longer encounter the original issue described in that ticket.

Refs

• The PR that implements scalable conversation bubbles and this issue was introduced: scale conversation widgets as window resizes #1206
• Underlying upstream issue that is causing us to create workarounds: Tracking upstream issue QTBUG-85498 #815
• Feature request for better handling of large amounts of data in our conversation bubbles, which could help close this issue: Improve handling of long messages #1094
• Scalability in Qt: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/scalability.html