RE: fonts

["Damon Chaplin" <DAChaplin email msn com>]

> >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?

There is no simpler selector at present, but if enough people want it,
then I can have a go. But then I think it would be difficult to get
everyone to agree on what should go in the simple font selector.
(Personally, I don't think it is too complicated at present)

> Some things that are confusing.. All the choices of "Font". Lucida I
> understand, but what is nil?

I don't know what nil is for, either. It just seems to be a standard X
font.

> And how would we want to handle fonts for different languages?

I think it is currently OK for European-type languages, but I didn't
add support for fontsets since I don't understand them.

> 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?

The '*'s are placed beside bitmap fonts (which aren't scaled). I thought of
using icons to show whether the font is a bitmapped font, a scalable font,
or
a scaled bitmapped font, but didn't get around to it.

> And what's the difference between points and pixels in selecting things?

Points are supposed to be device-independent (they are 1/72th of an inch),
so the font should be the same size on any monitor. Whereas if you specify
a pixel size, the font will be a different size depending on the resolution
of
the user's monitor.

> 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.

Yes, it is an X thing. I think it is partly due to the fact that some of the
fonts are designed for 75dpi monitors and some for 100dpi monitors, so the
sizes can be quite different.

> 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.

Yes, I agree!

Damon