Re: [Usability]Another fontilus feature

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 15:22, Per Cederberg wrote:
> Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> > Hi Aschwin,
> > 
> > On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Aschwin van der Woude wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >>For fontilus I implemented a nautilus-properties page. See the following
> >>screenhot for a preview:
> >>
> >>http://www.linux-aktivaattori.org/twiki/pub/Bazaar/GnomeTwoTesting/Screenshot-fontilus.png
> > 
> > 
> > Perhaps it would make sense to have some example-sentence (Quick Brown Dog
> > or something more original) in the properties instead of ABCD... I doubt
> > the ABC-order makes any sense for that Tengwar font, either. ;)
> 
> The "A quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" sentence is great, 
> especially as it contains almost all letters... in English.
> 
> Unfortunately there is an internationalization issue here, which I think 
> MS solved by having different sentences in different versions. That 
> doesn't work very well for those non-latin or symbolic fonts that I 
> have, or for the fonts not supporting my native language. On the other 
> hand, listing the latin alphabet doesn't work very well either, as some 
> users prefer writing in other scripts (arabic, hebrew, or chinese just 
> to mention some).
> 
> Sidetrack: How about adding a test input field? Ugly a sin, I know, but 
> might come in handy for users who like to test what едц looks like in 
> that particular font...

My gut instinct is that hardly anyone would use this.


Without trying to do anything smart (one could imagine heuristics that
might give better results than this, but that would be substantially
more complicated), I would suggest...

<12pt-l10n> A localized example sentence.
<18pt>      abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
<18pt>      ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
<18pt>      0123456789 () [] , " ! ? .

This attempts to provide some level of redundancy, while still providing
useful extra information in each line.

The first line gives the person a chance to visualize how the font will
look in use (presumably they primarily use whatever language their
computer is set in). If the font cannot display many of the characters
in their locale, this is useful information...consequently I would
suggest the example sentence make sure it includes any non-latin
characters commonly employed in the locale.

The larger "english alphabet" provides redundancy in case the person
has, say, a Chinese locale set but wants to produce an English document
and is looking at a font that does not include chinese characters
(virtually all fonts include a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and symbols).

The larger characters also give the user a sense of the detail of the
font that might not be visible from 12pt.

-Seth