Full screen designer?

Is it possible to get the designer to fill the full width of the browser window? The dimensions setting adds inline CSS that sets the artboard in pixels. It would be great to have it fill the screen, so users have a larger working area.

You can set it as you want by using DirectCSS settings at store level.
It was first introduced here:
http://support.realtimedesigner.com/forum/read.php?1,2999,2999

You can literally change every bit of you designer's CSS with it, and that includes of course the ability of using % instead of pixel values if you want to

Great. Thank you for this. I started looking through the link you gave and will do so more thoroughly this evening. This will be very helpful.

But thinking through this, the display CSS won't address the fact that when the canvas resizes, the system inserts pixel based inline CSS.

For example, I set a banner up to be 6ft x 3ft. The #imageContainer div and some child div's have inline CSS added that is pixel based. In this case, the styling is as follows...
<div id="imageContainer" style="width: 600px; height: 300px; border: 1px dashed rgb(0, 0, 0);margin: 0px;">

Is there a setting that would change this to not be fixed pixels and would instead use percentages? It would obviously need to maintain the proper aspect ratio.

That's the only thing you cannot rally change.
You can control how big in pixels it will be though, that's one of the setting at product level in the RTD (Max W in designer and Max H in designer settings of sizes, described starting here).

Now sorry in advance for this kinda complex reply, but you know... I like to be verbose and provide also some reasons for my replies!

The reason for that is that the design area itself needs in some way to have known coordinates in order to guarantee the correctness of everything you will put in there (AKA your customers' designs).

In any case, although it would be technically possible for you to override this with a mix of CSS and JS hacks (as just minimally introduced here), imageContainer would only be ONE of the divs to target. Almost any other subdiv of it would need to be "hacked", so this would not really be an optimal solution.

Another though "against" the use of percents there could the the display size itself: if one of your sizes is 3x6 ft, that means a portrait design area with a 1:2 scale ratio. With a width of 100% on a screen having like 1920px of width, that would give the design area a height of 3640 pixels!!!!!!
So in any case that would need to be conditional and have a cap. With pixels it is possible, and that's why you can set the Max W/H px values. But with percents that would no more be true.

So, if you want to maximize the design space I would rather suggest to use a higher Max W/H px value and alter where your other tools will be shown, IE re-designing your RTD layout.
If you really want to get creative you could even think at creating multiple RTD stores so tha you can have multiple DirectCSS entries. That could be used, for example, to create layouts specifically meant for computers and mobiles. Then you could detect which one you should be using from your website to so call the RTD with the more appropriate store for the layout you want to offer.

I think what I'm saying is that there are a lot of possibilities to play around the interface for you, and it's just impossible to list them all (I woulc write for hours just finding new ideas!). But it is also needed to know which elements wiull not offer you that much flexibility and why.