RE: fonts

[nelson media mit edu (Nelson Minar)]

>The GtkFontSelection & GtkFontSelectionDialog widgets are in GTK 1.1,
>and I hope provide an easy way for non-geeks to select X fonts.
>(http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~damon/fontsel/index.html has a gtk
>replacement for xfontsel, and some screenshots.)

Hey, that's a nice program, thanks! I really like the way you can
select fonts by what you care about - font family, then style, then
size. That's usually all I want to know about.

Just a couple of comments with respect to the current conversation:

It's got an awful lot of knobs on it. That's appropriate for fontsel,
which is more of a system tool, but I'd hate to be confronted with
this dialog if I'm just trying to make my terminal font bigger. It
might be nice to have all these options on an "Advanced" button, but
is there a simpler selector as well?

Some things that are confusing.. All the choices of "Font". Lucida I
understand, but what is nil? And how would we want to handle fonts for
different languages? Users probably shouldn't have to choose between
fixed(jis) and fixed(misc). In Font Style, do users need to separate
fonts by encoding? What do all the *s mean by the numbers on the
right? And what's the difference between points and pixels in
selecting things?

Also one bit of confusion in selecting: if you look at the
Clean/Medium set of fonts, then the size "15" is actually bigger than
the size "16". I imagine this is X's fault, not the font selector's,
but it's exactly the kind of X font nightmare that it would be nice if
GNOME could smooth over.


Again, I don't mean to criticise your program - it's quite good, a
hell of a lot better than xfontsel. But the problem of harnessing all
of X's fonts into something simple is really hard.