Font handling improvements
Operating System: all
Description of the feature
@user062 @barefootliam @aryeom @akkana Regarding recent changes in font and our capacity to better compare and manage them, here are a few thoughts:
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When someone clicks the bold button on some text, they usually mean for it to either a hand-made variant font if it exists or a faux bold (same for italic, oblique, etc.) (related to #1639 (closed)). This raises a few questions/enhancement needs: -
What GUI can we have to allow to create the faux bold/italic even when there is a hand-made variant. We don't want faux styles to be default, but having a way to get them anyway is still a good anyway (per discussion on IRC). -
How can we improve the GUI to tell that the current render is a "faux" rendered from a non-bold/italic font? -
And the follow-up/parallel question: when it's not a faux, shouldn't we tell what font is actually rendered? I.e. say we are on "" and we click the bold button, then a font called " Bold" exists and that's what we now use. Do we want to show this (maybe update the font list as though the user selected the bold variant from the list)? -
Then the reverse question is: what if the user selected a bold font from the start? Should we maybe click the bold button on behalf of the user and if they unclick it, we find and select the non-bold variant? But then what if they want a bolder font and the font family has an "ultrabold" variant? We'd want to leave the bold button unchecked for one-click bold→ultrabold changes to be possible.
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A few questions arised also about not showing all variants but only font family in the list and have sublists (see #93). This also raise a few questions about cases with different family fonts with a same name (which now works in GIMP!). -
I have a few questions about the aliases we create (Monospace, Sans-Serif, Serif and their variants) (see #840): -
I think that we should at least show what they actually are (some people just want a "Serif" font and it's fine, but we should still propose a way to know what these are IMO). -
When we save these fonts to XCF or when queried by plug-ins through PDB, the real font should be stored/returned IMO.
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These are all food for thoughts which I wanted to put black on white. If you have any thoughts, please share. I think whatever the final result of this discussion should be an improved UX design for the font-choosing widgets in GIMP (which are bad right now).
P.S.: putting a %3.0 milestone for now, though not everything has to be in 3.0. But at least the core principles which might break API.
Edited by Bruno