From: Hubert Figuiere (hub@nyorp.abisource.com)
Date: Wed Aug 28 2002 - 04:59:43 EDT
----- Forwarded message from owner-abiword-dev@abisource.com -----
Subject: Re: AbiWord Font Usability question
From: Seth Nickell <snickell@stanford.edu>
To: Dom Lachowicz <doml@appligent.com>
Cc: abiword-dev@abisource.com
In-Reply-To: <2DB3B496-B9F2-11D6-A466-0003934B5C22@appligent.com>
References: <2DB3B496-B9F2-11D6-A466-0003934B5C22@appligent.com>
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Date: 27 Aug 2002 23:58:53 -0500
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Of the options listed I like (2) (display fonts in their own face) best.
The appearance information is most useful when you are scanning large
numbers of items. Providing the information post-click / arrow key down
makes it a LOT harder to scan more than a dozen items. My only concern
with it would be performance.... But I think I have a better suggestion,
read on.
I see two distinct and major use cases for fonts:
1) Almost everyone makes consistent use of a sans-serif font and a serif
font. Most people don't really care which sans-serif or serif font this
is as long as it is a good one. People might also have a couple other
fonts they commonly use (say, a block lettering font, or a monospace
courier style font for somebody writing in code snippets).
2) Many people occasionally make signs or other less formal things where
they have an idea what font they have, but don't know exactly the font
on their system that best matches it. It is not uncommon for people to
have more than a hundred fonts on their system, and only be familiar
with several of them. However, in this use case people commonly want to
peruse all their fonts looking for the one that fits their concept best
("I just want the one with the best dark ages dungeon feel to it!!!!").
Microsoft seems to have recognized these use cases, and tries to fufill
(1) by providing an MRU list at the top of the font pulldown, and (2) by
printing fonts in their own face, providing for scanning of a large
number of "unknown" fonts. However, combo box lists are not a
particularly effective widget for more than 20 items or so, and can be
positively miserable on the not so uncommon systems with a hundred
fonts.
This makes (2) more difficult than it needs to be, since its worth the
time to open a new window when you are actually trying to browse your
list of fonts without knowing exactly which font you are looking for.
Additionally, it makes (1) somewhat less convenient both because you pay
a performance penalty to draw all those crazy fonts you probably won't
select anyway, and because its somewhat more mentally bewildering to
present that length of list.
Instead I propose to only include 5-8 MRU items in the font pulldown
menu (organized alphabetically, to organize by recency of use will
probably only serve to confuse), then a seperator then "Other Fonts..."
which will open up a font selection dialogue. The fonts in the pulldown
menu should be drawn in their own faces for consistency and to provide
familiarity between name<->appearance (strengthen the association
latently). The Other Fonts... dialogue should have a wider list
providing more space for exotic fonts, and could perhaps display the
fonts at a somewhat larger size. If sufficient extra information is
available it could also provide a way of organizing them by style (I
don't know how much extra information fonts have, but sorting by
"standard fonts", "serif fonts", "script fonts" etc could potentially be
useful, not sure, I'd have to see to really form a strong opinion).
Initially the MRU menu would be populated by a few exemplar fonts from
common classes. So for English (and probably most european languages?)
you'd have one font from "Times/Georgia/whatever", one font for
"Arial/Helvetica/whatever", and perhaps a titling font in the MRU by
default. Locales with their own standard fonts would have to provide a
few categories of font and standard versions of that category (and of
course, adding to the MRU menu is as simple as picking a font from Other
Font..., and should be easier than picking from the drop down list on
systems with lots of fonts anyway).
As a further optimization allowed by resticting the pulldown menu to a
fixed length, AbiWord could move to using an option menu control rather
than a combo box. Fitt's law says that time to acquire a target with the
mouse is a function of distance from the cursor and size of the target.
The pulldown button for combo boxes is a very small target indeed.
Option menus provide a much larger target. Combo boxes have a scrolling
ability however, that, I conjecture, is the main reason they have
traditionally been used for font menus. This need is eliminated with a
fixed length menu.
The only other advantage of a combo box is that you can directly type
the name of a font in rather than going through the list. I have rarely
seen this used, and its very hard to do without typeahead (which abiword
doesn't provide in the font combos anyway). My opinion is that the speed
gains from everyone having a bigger target to click on far outweigh the
cost of a few people not being able to type directly anymore. Also, the
Other Font feature could have typeahead font selection or even a search
box if some people need to access large numbers of fonts quickly (I know
this is not too uncommon for graphic layout folk....however I don't know
how relevant that activity is to a word processor).
-Seth
On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 14:21, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> Hi Seth,
>
> We're having a little discussion on the mailing list and I was
> wondering if you or other HIG people would like to comment on it and
> perhaps guide us to a good solution to it. Relevant links and threads
> include:
>
> http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/02/Aug/0505.html
> http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/02/Aug/0536.html
>
> Basically, we're wondering if our font combo box should be:
>
> 1) Just plain (font names only)
> 2) All font names should be displayed in their respective font face
> 3) Only the selected font should be displayed in its respective name
> 4) Marc's font preview window (see screenshot)
> 5) Combo of 3&4
> 6) Other...
>
> We've come up with good arguments for all of these suggestions and
> highly visable places where they are used and not used (such as
> WordPerfect, MSWord, Apple, ...) Any help, insight, direction, or
> otherwise would be very much appreciated by our users. I personally
> will accept make sure that the HIG team's suggestion gets implemented,
> within reason.
>
> Thanks,
> Dom
>
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