Re: Gtk+ Font Dialog improvements

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 19 Jul 2009, at 05:55, Henrique Carvalho Alves wrote:

> I did a mockup for a new gtk+ font chooser, as I find the current one
> lacking from usability aspects, and wanted to gather some feedback.  
> If there's any interest,
> please read the rationale at my blog:
>
> http://hcalves.tumblr.com/post/144502395/one-thing-i-dislike-on-gtk-its-the-current-font


It looks like a nice clean design, at first glance -- I haven't tried  
the code, so can't comment on the interaction details.

In addition to the other comments people have raised, might I throw in  
a couple of ideas from other font selectors that I've found useful  
over the years:

* The ability to create my own groups of fonts.

* The provision of a dynamic group that consists of (N) recently-used  
fonts.

* The ability to use a slider or spinbuttons to increase/decrease font  
size.  Alberto mentioned this too, but the specific use case I have in  
mind is when you have a selection of text in a document that includes  
a mixture of font sizes (and potentially different fonts, but that  
doesn't matter in this case), and you want to use the font dialog to  
change the properties of that selection.  With a slider, you can  
easily increase/decrease all the different font sizes in the selection  
by the same amount, which can be very useful indeed.

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems