From: Rui Miguel Seabra (rms@1407.org)
Date: Wed Aug 28 2002 - 07:49:41 EDT
A friend of mine performed as a consultant at a company here in
Portugal.
They bought PC window MS Windows for everyone, only to find out that
they still would have to pay thousands of euros for MS Office...
Hence, my friend came over, and suggested OpenOffice (he should have
suggested Gnome Office but *sigh* ;)) and guess what:
Most, thought that they provided exactly the same that MS Office (that
is, they don use that much features), and some even thought that it was
better.
Guess what was one of the killer features:
Being able to select font properties from the context menu.
Yes, font face, font size, et all. And it doesn't show the faces of
the fonts in their names.
Does this seem a contradiction on the perspective of the HIG? Maybe,
but I have the answer: not all users are blabbering idiots.
That said, Marc tactic is still the best one I ever saw:
1) The font names are fully readable
2) The font preview area is big enough for a fair appreciation of the
font face
Seth has a point when he says that having a lot of fonts is too much for
a combo style selection, however, here are some considerations:
1) it is very hard to categorize styles of fonts (serif, sans, mono)
font config may help, but is it there on all our platforms so that
we have that facility?
Even so, the user should be able to choose what font will serif,
sans or mono use *per application* if the idea is to reduce the
size of the list (in the default, I mean).
2) there are more types of fonts other than serif, sans and mono...
what could one do about this?
Instead of having:
| Serif Font |
| Sans Serif Font |
| Mono |
+-----------------+
| Other |
+-----------------+
Use:
| Serif Font |
| Sans Serif Font |
| Mono |
+-----------------+
| Other > +------------+
+---------------| Comic .... |
| Gothic ... |
| ... |
Problem: it impossible (AFAICT) in the combo boxes ;)
The reason that an 'Other' option is irrelevant, is that we already
have a format character menu option, so there is no need for that.
And yes, I have to strongly disagree with something:
Having the font names written with the font faces *is* significantly slower
and does not improve that much font recognition due to both size and
visual cluttering.
Go Marc!
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