Re: [Gimp-gui] PLEASE improve font organization

[Jehan <jehan girinstud io>]

Hi!

First of all, you should subscribe to this mailing list if you want to 
engage in a discussion. Your email was held by our mailing system 
because you are not subscribed so I had to manually approve it. It also 
means that if people answers to the mailing list only (which is what 
people do usually), you won't see their answer. I am making this fist 
answer by adding you to the Cc so that you receive this first answer 
hence are aware, but for following-ups, I will assume you will be 
subscribed.

On 6/29/22 16:58, publicbattery--- via gimp-gui-list wrote:
> The font selection dialog lacks filtering and grouping features, watch me try to
> find a font in a sea of system fonts: https://files.catbox.moe/995uim.webm
>
> In this post I will propose 2 improvements. Font management in GIMP is nothing
> short of archaic, but it's not only GIMP's problem, you'll see a lot of people
> complain about it in Adobe Photoshop as well.
> (https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/how-to-organize-group-fonts-in-photoshop/td-p/4691695)
> One could say indiscriminate alphabetic font lists are a remnant of the older
> desktop landscape, where there weren't a lot of installed fonts. Before anyone
> tells me to uninstall "uneeded" system fonts, I hope your realise how ridiculous
> that is.

No need to create "ridiculous" scenarios then. 😜 Nobody will tell you 
anything of the sort. Our font system is just old and outdated and had 
basically not been touched for more than 10 years (probably more).

The first step here is not that we miss the ideas, more that we miss 
contributors interested into improving this part of our GUI (which would 
definitely deserves more love, nobody will disagree).

> 1. Automatic grouping. It's true, you already can search for tags, but I have to
> apply those tags manually. Every font that GIMP obtains from my system should
> automatically have the tag "System" tag.
Sure. But what exactly is considered "system" fonts here? Anything which 
is not in GIMP's config dir?
> The other folder GIMP looks for fonts
> in my system is .config/GIMP/2.10/fonts/. I should be able to only see those
> fonts by typing "-System" (negative filtering). Further, I recently downloaded a
> font pack for manga scanlation:
>      ~/.config/GIMP/2.10/fonts/$ tree -d
>      └── scanlation
>          ├── Blambot
>          │   ├── ACME Secret Agent BB
>      ...
>          │   └── Zud Juice
>          └── Comicraft
>              ├── Absolutely Fabulous
>      ...
>              └── Zzzap
>
>      506 directories, 1592 files
>
> Since these are all under a directory called "scanlation", they should come
> tagged with that. The font Zud Juice should come tagged with "scanlation" and
> "Blambot".
Not everyone organizes their fonts by folders. But since we control the 
"format" of what goes in the config dir, sure we could make it some kind 
of rule that directories under `fonts/` are converted into tags. It's 
not a bad idea.
> 2. Condense font families in some way: "It would
> also be wonderful if GIMP would condense its font list into families instead of
> displaying each individual one. Eg, Arial, Arial Italic, Arial Bold, and Arial
> Bold Italic could easily be one entry instead of four. Scrolling past a
> gazillion fonts just to reach the one I want to use is getting annoying.",
> Snowyn said in Mar 2016:
> (https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-user-list/2016-March/msg00079.html)

I understand. Though I think that the point is also that these are 
considered fonts of their own. I.e. using your example, sure Arial 
Italic and Arial are related, but Arial Italic is more than just Arial 
glyphs made italic. It is its own font (in its specific style).

Now we would actually need more inputs from the people more 
knowledgeable about fonts and its ecosystem. Liam, if you read this, 
maybe you have an opinion to share?

> I find that the font selection dialog is especially useless if I /don't/ know
> what I'm looking for, since 80% of the list is clogged by contiguous blocks of
> the same family (with slight differences!), the font selection is a pain in the
> ass as "font gallery", it's unusable for "discovery". And I'm sure that if
> you're providing font previews then you admit you're not expecting users to know
> the precise name of every font they chose. Discovery is an intended element of
> the font browser, it's just been always, eh, crap. But it doesn't have to.

Yeah current font list interaction is bad, definitely. It's not just 
about the "blocks of the same family". It's also simply not searchable 
and our filtering system is antiquated and very hard to use. This would 
be a very nice UX work to handle for any new contributor wishing to 
help. Discussions on a better UI are very welcome here, though in the 
end, we'll also need a contributor to make theory into practice.

Jehan

> _______________________________________________
> gimp-gui-list mailing list
> gimp-gui-list gnome org
> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-gui-list

--
ZeMarmot open animation film
http://film.zemarmot.net
Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/ZeMarmot/
Patreon: https://patreon.com/zemarmot
Tipeee: https://www.tipeee.com/zemarmot