[Nautilus-list] [LONG]Font handling and gnome compliance RANT

[Nicolas Mailhot <Nicolas Mailhot email enst fr>]

Hello all,

 I switched from windows to linux a few years back, being
disgusted with the various ways Windows is broken, font
handling being one. Once upon a time one had to learn
.Xdefault syntax, do complex xfs magic to have a decent
display in XFree --but at least you could have one. Then
came Gnome, and you only had to go throught one (slightly
broken, certainly *hard* to use) font selector to have a
nice system font in all your gtk apps.

 I won't describe at length why choosing a good system font
is important to me. Suffice to say I use a 100dpi screen
(with X tuned acordingly) with a french locale. 100dpi makes
messages smaller if someone uses a dumb default font (a
correct font, on the other hand, will take more pixel
space). French locale makes them longer (and requires
accentuated letters). Mix them both and you have the perfect
recipe for blowing up badly coded apps.

 Of course, gtk and gnome apps, even in alpha, have no
problem with this, since they use the system font the user
lovingly chose in his control center, right ?

 WRONG. There is one offender, one app which bothers more
about eye-candy than good sence, one app which sneers at
user choices in numerous ways, I named Nautilus.

 It begins with the first install wizard. It does use the
system font. However, someone decided showing the background
pixmap was more important than letting the user see the
installation instuctions, and therefore hard-coded the
dialog size (and even forbid its resizing). No problem as
the user will certainly be overjoyed to change its
systemwide settings in order to read these important
instructions.

 Then comes the startup splash-screen (wich can' be unset,
by the way, when even the much more important and less
anoying gnome startup spash-screen can). It's just a bit of
text, right ? No reason at all to design a new widget, right
? WRONG. This time, there is room enough for a lot more (or
bigger) text. But someone decided he knew better than the
user what font should be used !

 From there on things only go downhill. The list view uses
its own font. Not only does this forces a normal user to
re-select its prefered font, but the developpers brightly
decided the gtk font selector was a pain to use (they're
right of course), but instead of fixing it designed their
own font picker, specific to Nautilus AND the list view, and
restricted to 4 (four) fonts (all of them broken on my box
by the way). No thanks. Normal coders use the gtk font
picker. It may be difficult but at least it WORKS.

 The icon view avoided this pitfall by hardcoding the family
and size of the font to use. The user isn't bothered with a
font picker, be it difficult to use or totally broken. The
coder only forgot some people use other screen resolutions
than him, and may want to use a bigger (or smaller) font.

 I'm afraid no one had the time to be creative with the tree
view, so it's the only one that's still legible. It uses the
gtk system font. What's wrong with this ? What's wrong with
taking the system font, use proportional size based on this
font, bold or italic when needed ? Why do the Nautilus
developpers think they know better than the user ? What's
the point of a desktop environment where every app have it's
own way despite of the control center settings (and that's
also shown in Nautilus refusal to respect the
text-under-toolbar setting unlike gmc, for example).

 Please take this into account *now* before adding a bunch
of other broken views. I may use Nautilus yet. And this is
supposed to be one of Gnome's core apps, right ?

-- 
Nicolas