Re: RFC font ui

On 2/1/07, Reinout van Schouwen <reinout@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Tomas,
>
> 2007/1/28, Tomas Frydrych <tf@o-hand.com>:
>
> > I have been pondering couple of issues that relate to our font UI that
> > as user I am not happy with, and think should be addressed before the
> > 2.6 release.
>
> (...)
>
> I recently bumped into an article about font selection UI and thought
> it might be relevant in this discussion.
>
> Read it here: http://unifont.org/fontdialog/

Hi Reinout,

thanks for pointing that out. I'm not convinced about the proposed
approach though, so here is my backseat HCI person, "orange sunglasses
wannabe" verdict:
+ Excessive categorisation and hierarchy is bad. Only a small fraction
of the "tree" will be of interest for one user, few are going to mix
e.g. arabic and cjk (estimation).
+ Using standard widgets in a nonstandard way (tree view in combo box)
is counter intuitive.
+ Advanced information such as ttf/ps font and similar may be needed
for a graphics app but hardly for a word processor.
+ Trying to render previews inline in the combo is a cpu / disk hog. Been there.

So?
Probably sorting the last recently used fonts on top of the font combo
would go a long way. We'll possibly have that for 2.6. Even better if
it's prefilled with used fonts detected at document load time (would
be some more work).

Best,
Rob
Received on Thu Feb 1 22:01:22 2007