From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Tue Aug 27 2002 - 14:31:12 EDT
On Tuesday, August 27, 2002, at 02:09 AM, Joaquín Cuenca Abela wrote:
> It seems that the 2 main criticism against the way Word handles font
> preview are:
>
> 1) Usability. As Karl said "The font size is much
> to small to get a useful impression of the font (and often make it
> very difficult to read the actual font name)"
>
> 2) Resources. It takes too much to preview all the fonts.
This is not counting my:
3) This approach is not necessarily desirable because it's kind-of ugly
and the list is potentially hard to read through (potentially related
to how well the human eye scans through many short text strings that
are written in a variety of font faces).
I can't advocate emulating MSWord without considering that there might
be viable alternatives. Please try to consider my suggestion that
Marc's font preview + always previewing the currently used font
(inside of the toolbar) might be a *superior* approach to what MSWord
does from a usability standpoint. It is interesting to notice that
Apple's font selection dialogs don't display each font's name in that
particular font's face. They do, however, display the selected font's
name in its respective face, though.
We are not usability experts and shouldn't pretend to be. I promise to
talk to the GNOME HIG and Seth Nickell about this and see what they
have to say in this matter. I am not advocating my suggestion or
"dissing" yours. I am merely pointing out that there is more than one
*good* suggestion on the table here, and we should really get some
more-expert opinion here before actually doing anything. Usability
features done poorly often are worse than not having those features at
all.
Re: performance - For what it's worth, Mariner Write on OSX has this
feature. I have a fast (866MHz 512MB RAM) Mac running Jaguar. It takes
~4 seconds to load and display the font menu. It is also sluggish when
scrolling. GNOME HIG guidelines state that an operation like this
should take about .1 seconds, so this would be about 40x too slow.
BBEdit 6,5's font menu has a similar startup problem. Hub pointed out
on IRC that some older apps did some hacking/caching to get around this
problem. They'd store the font name + the preview image in a cache to
get around this slowness.
Will a performance hit like these affect us? I honestly don't know and
would like to find out. Has it hit other apps like us? Definitely yes.
Add to that the perceived slowness of Xft (noticed by some Abi folks
and other projects) and this becomes a very valid concern of mine.
Period.
And please use this new title. This thread is not about a "Print
Preview Screenshot" and the title is really starting to annoy me :)
Cheers,
Dom
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