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

["Henrique Carvalho Alves" <hcarvalhoalves gmail com>]

2008/8/17 Henrique Carvalho Alves <hcarvalhoalves gmail com>:
> 2008/8/17 Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>:
>>> 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
>>
>
> You're right. The current font dialog also fails for that (see Ubuntu,
> which ships some fonts for other languages, and the preview just
> presents a default "abcdABCDE" text in sans). I too guess finding the
> glyph coverage for the font is hard and not reliable. As stated on the
> last reply, making the preview editable is better, of course. The
> question here: is using the font name and size as preview text a
> better default?
>

Second try, based on feedback gathered here:
http://hcalves.com/media/files/fontselector2.tar.gz

Full history, details and screenshots:
http://hcalves.com/blog/2008/08/17/font-dialog-proposal-gtk/