Re: gtk-devel-list Digest, Vol 52, Issue 27

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

On Sun, 2008-08-17 at 13:54 -0300, Henrique Carvalho Alves wrote:

> The problem here is that "Quick brown fox..." doesn't make sense in
> any language. "Lorem ipsum..." also doesn't make sense for someone who
> doesn't know it's a dummy text. A common user would just popup the
> dialog and say "What means that? I can't read
> <english/latim/whatever>!". Some users might even get offended.
> 
> So I tough using the font name and size is random enough to provide a
> preview with glyphs, spacing and numerals; is a short text; makes
> sense inside the context; makes sense for international users; is
> visually informative, as displays meta-information (the font you
> selected in the font itself). Do you know any case were displaying
> with the font name would be a problem?

Imagine you are working in a western locale and selecting a font to
write text in arabic. The font you are looking for does most likely not
even provide the glyphs to render its name (as the font name will be
shown in your current locale).

Another example is a symbol font. It typically doesn't include any
letters.

Using the font name for preview does not work. You could try to add some
heuristics that select a reasonable text depending on font coverage. But
that is likely going to fail in some corner cases. So whatever you end
up doing, you should give the user a way to change the text used for
preview.


Sven