Re: [Usability] Gtk+ Font Dialog improvements

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Henrique Carvalho Alves wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Henrique Carvalho Alves wrote:
> >
> > > There was discussion on this some time ago, and the discussion
> > > got lost. I'm trying to raise interest on this issue again.
> > >
> > > 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...
> >
> > I agree this is a substantial improvement on the standard dialog.
> >
> > I have one additional beef with the existing selector, admittedly
> > more of a app-developer thing than a UI matter: the lack of any
> > means of asking for a subset of fonts to be displayed, e.g.
> > monospaced, or Roman text.
>
> There could be an option to call the dialog passing what filter
> to use by default.
>
> There's already some filters (common fonts, fixed-width,
> variable-width), if we can gather more data from Pango to
> categorize fonts, more can be added.

I don't think there are _any_ filters available at present
(although there used to be a long time ago, in GTK 1.2, and for a
while that information persisted at some level in the GTK
documentation, even though it was obsolete).  I'm looking at the
latest API docs at

http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/unstable/GtkFontSelection.html

and

http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/unstable/GtkFontSelectionDialog.html

The only "set" functions are

gtk_font_selection_set_preview_text() ,
gtk_font_selection_dialog_set_font_name() and
gtk_font_selection_dialog_set_preview_text()

and you can't set a filter via the Properties of a
GtkFontSelection either.

Allin Cottrell