One particular script was to remind me to take a break every so often, when it popped up a dialog box it has a random fortune in it. This was fairly easy to get going but there were a couple of strange behaviours in zenity that I had to figure out.
First one was random sizes of dialog box. When using the --info selection of dialog box often the windows it created were off the screen, even with small amounts of text.
This seems to be due to zenity wrapping the text with a fixed width as mentioned in a number of bug postings, so to solve this I used the --no-wrap option.
Second one is a little more random. I had occasionally noticed my dialog boxes containing the text "All updates are complete", originally I thought that maybe this was a random fortune, however none of the fortune files contains this string.
Doing some further digging, I found out that this is the default message (mentioned here) and that zenity is trying to handle Pango markup and that I should make sure that any of the following characters "&\<>" are escaped prior to passing in.
In later versions of zenity (including the version I am using) there is an undocumented option --no-markup. This now works however I cannot pass "\n" to be interpreted as a new line. Therefore I can either, use this option and explicitly put a line break in the output I want, or pass the output of fortune through sed first and not worry about the no markup option.
The invocation of sed is
sed -e 's/\\/\\\\/g' -e 's/&/\&/g' -e 's/</\</g' -e 's/>/\>/g
There was another issue I came across.
When zenity generates a dialog box it will try to place it above the window where it was launched from, it does this by getting the environment variable $WINDOWID, to prevent this unset this variable in the script before calling zenity.
