From koffice Wed Sep 28 04:18:05 2005 From: "Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris" Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 04:18:05 +0000 To: koffice Subject: Fwd: [Gimp-developer] Designing a Better Font Selection Widget for Message-Id: <200509280118.05497.gwidion () mpc ! com ! br> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=koffice&m=112788092320798 Hi - I had not seem this hit this list. The people at GIMP-Devel got quite interested - ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: [Gimp-developer] Designing a Better Font Selection Widget for use in Open Source Software Date: Tuesday 27 September 2005 14:36 From: "Edward H. Trager" To: gtk-i18n-list@gnome.org, kde-devel@kde.org, dev@openoffice.org, inkscape-devel@sourceforge.net, gimp-developer@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu Hi, everyone, This message is an open letter to: - Gnome Desktop developers - KDE Desktop developers - OpenOffice.org developers - Gimp developers - Inkscape developers ... regarding a proposal for an improved font selection drop-down widget that would be ideal for use in professional-quality Open Source word processing, desktop publishing, and graphic design programs such as OpenOffice.org, Gimp, Inkscape, and similar programs. The proposal suggests a design that is particularly applicable where users require a streamlined and intuitive interface for selecting multiple fonts from large font collections present on the user's machine. The proposal also attempts to fully address aspects of internationalization related to font selection that I believe have been largely overlooked until now. Finally, the proposal suggests using a common XML configuration file which for storing font collection information. To see the full proposal, please see: http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontdialog/ The rest of this email provides a synopsis of the proposal. Synopsis ======== Although important Open Source desktop software has advanced rapidly in the last few years and now easily rivals and in many cases surpasses commercial equivalents in terms of functionality and ease of use, the font selection drop-down widgets and font selection dialog boxes in many programs still lack a number of important features. (This is also true among commercial software too, but that is not our concern here). First, many programs do not provide adequate font previews at the stage where the user is choosing from a (now-a-days usually very long) drop-down list of available fonts. Even when font previews are provided, they are often limited to a preview of Latin glyphs and thus provide no information about the appearance of non-Latin glyphs for, say, Chinese, Thai, or Arabic users trying to pick fonts for their language. Secondly, a very long list of alphabetically-sorted font names is not ideal. Fonts need to be organized and presented to the user in logical groups, as is done in Apple OS X (where they are called "collections"). These groups can and should be both system-defined and user-defined. System-defined groups would include font categories like "Sans", "Serif", "Monospace", "Recently Used", and "Chinese". User-defined groups might include categories like "Script", "Black Letter", "Funky", or "Fonts for the new company brochure". The proposal at http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontdialog/ addresses how these goals can be met. Implementation of the proposed font selection widget at the GUI toolkit level (i.e., in GTK+ and in KDE) along with an XML-based configuration scheme standardized across toolkits and desktops would do much to help create a more intuitive and more uniform user experience on Linux and related Open Source platforms. I welcome the community's suggestions and criticisms -- -- Ed Trager maintainer of "Unicode Font Guide For Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems" http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontguide/ _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer ------------------------------------------------------- ____________________________________ koffice mailing list koffice@kde.org To unsubscribe please visit: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice