From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Aug 28 2002 - 05:29:37 EDT
--- Hubert Figuiere <hub@nyorp.abisource.com> wrote:
> ----- 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!!!!").
For people not using western European languages there
is another factor when choosing fonts, you want a font
which has the characters needed for your language.
I'd say this is also very common.
> 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,
The concept of "alphabetically" becomes slightly
more complex on a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean user's
system since many but not all CJK font names have
native names:
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3220
This is probably minor.
> to organize by recentness 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",
The third one should be Courier or equivalent.
The three basic font categories are serif, sans, and
mono.
Others may argue for script or symbol but those are
less important imho.
I personally always want Arial Unicode MS and Code2000
because they have the best Unicode coverage.
> 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).
On Windows systems there are specific fonts which
come with each language pack. Sometimes one,
sometimes
several. On Linux it may be best to leave it to the
distros that actually support non-european languages?
> 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
If you can type the font you need to dynamically
scroll
to the entries matching what you've typed so far or
perpahs reduce the list to just those that match.
That's my 2 cents.
Andrew.
> (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
> >
>
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
=====
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