Re: [Gimp-gui] Are fontconfig aliases meaningful?

[Jehan <jehan girinstud io>]

Hi,

On 2015-10-25 20:53, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Oct 2015 19:00:46 +0100 Jehan <jehan girinstud io> wrote:
>
> > For GIMP images, it means that when you select "Sans", you don't even
> > know which font is actually behind. Worse if you send a XCF to 
> > someone,
> > on text edit, the font will change (if another is used under the hood
> > for the other person).
>
> This means the aliased fonts aren't suitable for interchange - but
> fc-list here produces over 7,000 entries, and I can't assume that
> someone else will have, say, MVP Celestia installed on their system.

No but at least you can output an error. This is something which I have 
added in GIMP: when you try to edit a text and you happen not to have 
the right font, the font name is red and hovering it, it tells you what 
was the original font. This allows users to have the "information" which 
helps them search the right font.
With "Sans-serif", you'll just never get an error (everybody has a 
Sans-serif font, simply not the same as your neighbour) and you are 
ignorant of the problem which will occurs the second you will start 
editing your text.

> The aliases are great when you want a font that matches the UI, and
> they are useful for defaults e.g. in scripts where you've no idea what
> fants the user will have.

I agree. This is why I think the usage of alias should not be banned. 
Simply we should make clear to users which is the actual font used, in 
my opinion, and this knowledge should also be in the XCF (not the 
alias).

> You can also use them to construct fonts - e.g. I make a version of
> Courier that's horizontally condensed, although they don't seem to
> work in gimp.

You mean aliases that you built yourself? Actually we don't "discover" 
aliases from GIMP. We manually and explicitly added the 3 aliases. Do 
you know if there is an API to discover all existing aliases?

Of course, this creates a clear problem of interchange here.

> > I definitely prefer to know which font is actually used (and on file
> > sharing, if the other does not have the right font, get a message
> > telling you the font name which is missing so that I can search and
> > install it).
> Better might be a dialogue a la Quark Express, that shows which fonts
> are used with a project. An option to keep fonts in a per-project
> directory (folder) and activate them only when the project is open
> would be awesome.

Could you explain this? I don't really understand. Is this dialog and 
the option 2 different features?

> > Solution could be that when I click an alias, it actually change
> > directly into the actual font.
>
> But if I save the file, change theme, open the file again, maybe I now
> want the current theme font to be used? I'm not sure, I think it'd be
> OK either way.

The thing is that when you reopen the file, the text is *not* 
re-rendered. So right now you can perfectly open a XCF file for which 
you don't have the fonts, do some edits on the image (even transform the 
text layers without touching the contents) and re-export, all this 
without ever installing the fonts. Which I think is a very cool and 
useful behaviour (it saved me a lot of time many times when I just 
wanted to touch non-text layers in XCF made by someone else, or with 
fonts I didn't have anymore). A text layer is re-rendered only when you 
start editing it (and only then not having the right font becomes a 
problem), which actually makes a lot of sense.
This prevents common issues like in other software when you open a file 
someone sent you and it looks horribly broken at import.

So what you say would not even work that easily. You'd have to open the 
file, then try to edit every text to force them changing to the locale 
font for a given alias.

> > I want the information of which actual
> > font was used stored in the XCF. Not only for sharing, but even if I
> > ever want to edit the file later on another computer.
> It would help if Image->Information had a "fonts" tab.

Yes that's a good idea. Actually such a tab could even have some feature 
like changing all texts with a given fonts into another font in one 
click! This would solve your idea of UI mockups much better than 
"reopening a file after changing a theme".

> When we add opentype feature support this will become more important
> and the font chooser may need revamping too (e.g. "I want a font with
> a ct ligature").

Yes a lot of things need revamping in the font choosing UIs anyway, even 
without opentype!
This topic by itself is a whole huge can of worms!

Jehan

> Liam