[BUG] Mirth administrator menu size / scrolling issues

[ppazos]

Describe the bug

The first issue is some scrollable areas just don't go all the way down, so I can't see, for instance, the complete configuration of source connectors. This is important because I can't change the configurations I don't see.

Second issue is the width of the menu is too short to display long texts so those get clipped. Though I know what I should see, it's annoying for instance when sharing my screen with a colleague and I need to point to an item in the menu that says "Edit Transforme...". It would be better that the width adapts to the longest item in the menu, or the user can control the width to the desired size.

Note I tried installing Tahoma as suggested here and it made all the characters to be really close, which makes small labels difficult to read (at least for me that can't see very well when text is small or too dense).

To Reproduce

1. Run Mirth Administrator on a Linux Mint box (doesn't have the tahoma windows font, this is important!)
2. Check the menu, it clips the text
3. Check source or destination connector configuration panels that are long on a screen with 1366x768 of resolution, it messes with the scroll and it doesn't display the whole configuration panel

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

See above.

Expected behavior

1. The text in the menu shouldn't be clipped, even if I don't have the font installed, this can't be a technical requirement.
2. Configuration panels should scroll all the way down, can't hide content, independently of the screen resolution.

One suggestion for the menu, is to dynamically calculate it's width based on the width of the longest item in it, and/or, add a handle to the menu to allow the user to change its width and store the desired value for the current display they are using, so next time it can load that value on start up.

For the scrolling issue, one possibility is to add some buffer below, just space, to make the scroll longer, or to detect the visible area height correctly and scroll accordingly.

Actual behavior

Clipping the text in the menu and not scrolling all the way down on small resolution displays. I guess Mirth devs all have HD displays :)

Screenshots

See above.

Environment (please complete the following information):

• OS: Linux Mint 21.3
• Java Distribution/Version JDK 11 Liberica (based on OpenJDK)
• Connect Version 4.4.0

Workaround(s)

Installed the tahoma font as suggested and the menu situation is solved, but just because that font has almost no space between characters, so it makes all labels narrower, but that, at least for me, makes all labels harder to read.

[jonbartels]

Discussed at https://github.com/nextgenhealthcare/connect/discussions/6087

I have two ideas for solutions:

• Is it possible for the Mirth tarball to include the tahoma fonts? Both technically (like can Swing read the TTF files) and legally (is it allowed to distribute the font for free).
• I know that customizing the MC UI is tricky, but is it time to crack into it and change from Tahoma to something thats freely available on most OSes?

[ppazos]

@jonbartels I don't think making Mirth Administrator more dependent on a specific font is any good. Actually on Linux, since there is no Tahoma.ttf it uses some default system font, which is OK. The real problem is how Mirth Administrator uses the font size as a reference to size other things, like the menu width or the scrolling height of the configuration panels.

For me the best solution is to define the widths and heights of things in a more dynamic way, independently from the type of font or size of font.