From: Alan Horkan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Tue Aug 27 2002 - 14:43:31 EDT
On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 14:31:12 -0400
> From: Dom Lachowicz <doml@appligent.com>
> To: abiword-dev@abisource.com
> Subject: Re: font preview screenshot
>
>
> 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
I have started to realise that when looking at word processor user
interfaces you should
Look at Corel WordPerfect,
Microsoft Word
wordperfect may have done it first but in the case of the table widget
Microsoft improved it, chunkier bigger target easier)
and Microsoft Word on the Apple Mac
the Microsoft Apple programmers have Mac usuability guideline to contend
with and a certain freedom to improve the GUI, (Word 97 on PC, Word 98
on the Mac)
there may be others with occasionally good ideas, but you definately want
to look at wordperfect which i strongly suspect is what Uwog was inspired
by.
> We are not usability experts and shouldn't pretend to be. I promise to
:) never let that stop me before, and i am trying hard to learn about
usabilty.
even if we dont pretend to be experts we should be usually able to narrow
things down to a few ideas and get the usability experts to examine and
evalute the proposed solutions.
> talk to the GNOME HIG and Seth Nickell about this and see what they
Sincerely
Alan "Usability Amateur" Horkan
http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/
http://mozilla.org
http://gnome.org
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