RFC font ui

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.

1. Handling of Absent Fonts in the UI
-------------------------------------
If I load a document that has text formatted with a font I do not have,
and position the caret into that text the font combo will be set at the
default font (in my case Times New Roman). This is rather misleading,
particularly when the absent font is meant to be sans-serif. An obvious,
but not entirely satisfying option, would be to have an empty entry in
the list of the font combo and use that.

Another, I think far more satisfactory solution, would be for the font
combo to be able to dynamically insert a new row for the missing font.
This way the user would actually know what font the document is using,
and be able to formally use that font for changes to that particular
document; I suspect this would be not be hard to do at least in the *nix
font combo widget.

2. Size of the Font list
------------------------
Currently the font list is huge. It displays every single usable font on
the system. Many of these fonts have been installed by the distribution,
and many of these are there to provide coverage for exotic languages
that I do not use; as a user I do not want to see these fonts on the
combo list. At the same time, I do not want to address this problem by
removing those fonts from my system, as I want for these fonts to be
used when I get a document that uses them.

The font combo is filled using the graphics getAllFont() function; I
would like to be able to customize what that function returns. I am
thinking that on the *nix we could store a set of fontconfig rules that
are to be used in compiling the all-fonts list, and the default rule
would restrict the font list to fonts for the current locale. We would
then have a preference "show all fonts" defaulting to 'off'. The normal
user who would want to see all fonts in the combo could just tick that
box, and the power user, wishing a finer control over what is shown,
could provide her own set of fontconfig rules in the profile.

I think this filtering should only apply to the combo; the font dialog
could still be providing access to all the fonts (it's just a question
of passing a boolean flag into getAllFonts).

Tomas
Received on Sun Jan 28 09:59:26 2007