Improvements to Font Handling
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00:00
Computer fontDecision theoryInformationFile formatPermanentAssociative propertyCondensationMathematicsBounded variationGreen's functionComputer iconComputer fontPoint cloudSoftware bugPrice indexBitSubstitute goodExpert systemOpen sourceLink (knot theory)CondensationPhysical systemCategory of beingMereologyArithmetic meanBlock (periodic table)Multiplication signElectronic mailing listCASE <Informatik>Different (Kate Ryan album)Cursor (computers)Sheaf (mathematics)InformationSpecial unitary groupSelectivity (electronic)Point (geometry)Medical imagingOverlay-NetzExpressionAreaDrop (liquid)Set (mathematics)Dependent and independent variablesData storage deviceComputer animation
07:09
Bounded variationPhysical systemContext awarenessMenu (computing)Instance (computer science)Configuration spaceInstallation artDirectory serviceSoftware maintenanceComputer configurationElectronic mailing listComputer fontDefault (computer science)Menu (computing)Similarity (geometry)Order (biology)Sign (mathematics)Extension (kinesiology)Bounded variationPosition operatorBookmark (World Wide Web)Pointer (computer programming)Table (information)Computer iconCondensationMereologyStorage area networkNumberQuicksortBitArithmetic meanSelectivity (electronic)Physical systemLogic synthesisOpen setForm (programming)Price indexCASE <Informatik>CuboidDigitizingData managementOpen sourceFiber (mathematics)Revision controlStaff (military)Bit rateLocal ringDrop (liquid)Perturbation theoryComputer animationProgram flowchart
14:13
Configuration spaceComputer fontFiber bundleComputer configurationDisintegrationExtension (kinesiology)Physical systemLink (knot theory)Hill differential equationComputer fontTouchscreenComputer fileRight angleAdditionUsabilityConfiguration spaceDrop (liquid)Physical systemTable (information)Computer configurationSubstitute good1 (number)Sound effectCASE <Informatik>Extension (kinesiology)Bookmark (World Wide Web)Electronic mailing listWindowSelectivity (electronic)Cartesian coordinate systemSpacetimeOrder (biology)Directory serviceComputer programmingField (computer science)Installation artConnected spaceExpert systemDefault (computer science)Electric generatorData managementMereologyAssociative propertyMusical ensembleExistenceInformationRule of inference2 (number)Software bugComputer animation
21:16
Service (economics)CollaborationismComputer animationProgram flowchart
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
Let's start. Improvements to font handling, and there might be people who say that's shenanigans. What's all about it? Thing is, we have a lot of tickets
00:20
in our bug tracker about fonts. Many are things that do not work. Font doesn't show up, or is crumbled, or whatever. And many others are enhancement requests. I try to collect everything here in the tech cloud. Green is enhancement, yellow to red
00:42
with importance are issues. I'm trying to talk about the green stuff, only the green things, because you need to be an expert to understand the problem with fonts when there's an issue. So I will talk about three larger areas,
01:01
how fonts could be improved. The first one is things about substitution. That means you get a document with some alien font like Helvetica, and you have to replace it because it's not on your system. That's quite a typical thing, and it is implemented like this.
01:23
Today you get in the standard toolbar a dropdown, and the font name is written in italic for this font that is being replaced. And the tool tip says this font is substituted. It does not work in the character dialogue,
01:40
so it's only in this dropdown. You don't know what font is actually replaced by what, and you cannot, okay, you know what I mean, so what do we have to do? First thing is I'm trying to put all the requests, the tickets that we have into user stories.
02:02
I start with a persona, the target user. We have two personas, Benjamin and Eve. Don't want to go into detail in user story to tell you what is the problem, what the user want to achieve, for what reason. So Benjamin, as the standard user, does not care at all about the font.
02:22
It has to work, and I would say it works somehow, but it's not perfect, but it works for Benjamin. Eve, she wants to see what the actual replacement is for the current selection, where the cursor is, but she also wants to see, in case a document has more than one font,
02:41
what is, obviously, the whole document, what is replaced in the document. Two simple requests, and it could be solved like this. First of all, if you open a document, you can show easily an info bar. Here, there is something that has been replaced.
03:01
You can get a link on it, where you can go further to some dialogue, where you can manipulate it, come later to this point. Second one is the dropdown that we have today, the font list dropdown could easily show what font has been replaced by which one.
03:22
It's not a big deal, I guess. And finally, the dialogue at the bottom, it's also not a big thing to show here what happened. I will later come to the point with the icon. The icon is here the indicator for something special.
03:46
So if you open the font list, and the font is replaced, you get this icon here, some kind of warning icon. It is a bit better than the italic font. It is not really obvious what italic means.
04:01
An icon is a better indicator for kind of warning. It is a warning. So what else? Second part of the request was that Eve wants to get an overview for the full document, and this overview could be in the document properties. We have a font section there,
04:20
and it could provide a list of all fonts there with a nice overview, because actually you don't want to get the name of the font. Helvetica or Times New Roman is replaced by Nimbus Roman. I don't care about the font names. I want to see what the difference is.
04:42
What does it mean to substitute the font? And this preview could overlay two example images and show just nicely the difference. I think you guessed what's behind it.
05:02
Next one. It is a feature also requested here for us, that Microsoft has, if you store the document, do you still want to use the substituted font or do you, the original, or do you want to use the substituted font?
05:22
There's no mean today. Microsoft has it, and it is requested. The second one, the restriction is about that we do not need to spam the document with fonts. If we save fonts in the document, it should be limited to the used stuff only. Belongs a little bit to the question,
05:40
and solution is that we adjust the checkbox below this list, again, in the document properties dialog. Of course, Eve also wants to manipulate it. If Eve does not like how Nimbus replaces Times,
06:03
she might want to try another font, some liberation or whatever, and this is not a big deal. It could be a drop-down list or whatever here. It is just another request.
06:21
So far, for substitution, we have published it some time ago, two years or so, on the design block. It is nothing new. New is that we also have a large list of fonts and selection is not so easy. One issue here, for example,
06:40
is that you get the DejaVu fonts splitted into all the special expressions, the sun's light, sun's condensed. It's all one font. So that's an issue or something that can be improved.
07:02
An issue is it because on macOS you don't get the special things. The actual requirement is that the long list needs to be structured a little bit better.
07:22
It should be easy to find the font that you are looking for and you don't want to get bothered by all the variations. A proposal on the ticket is that it goes into a submenu. So you open the dropdown and in the submenu
07:41
you get the variations, the light and condensed and whatever it is. Another idea is to have two dropdowns next to each other. In the first one you select the font and the next one you select the style of this font. Third one is to indent the styles a little bit.
08:06
None of these are really nice, but we have to find a solution for this problem. Maybe I have it later. Next thing is that you not only want to get bothered
08:24
by the styles, you also want to just get a condensed list of fonts that is useful in the current situation. Do I have an example?
08:41
Yes, example is on my system installed PO52. I don't know where it comes from. It's something which belongs to X if I remember correctly or whatever. I also do not care about Greek and no Hebrew and Arab. I don't speak any Arab. So I would like to hide all these fonts that I never use
09:05
to get a small list where I can find it more quickly than today. Becomes even more relevant with the new Notor fonts. It adds a lot to the selection.
09:22
So what we need is something to probably filter the font list requests have been made to find favorites. Maybe I want to use large number of fonts
09:41
for my design work, but usually I write documents and when I write documents, I just want to have five different fonts to choose from. So I want to favorite things. I want to select the fonts that are used for my local system. Chinese people probably do not care about fonts
10:03
that don't have any of these Unicode pointers in it. And what else? Use fonts in the document is also something that you want to move on a specific position. There are some possible solutions.
10:23
It's nothing, it's really completely new. TextMaker and Scribus has a way to hide fonts from the UI. Just don't use it. It is here, this checkbox. We could do it kind of similar way
10:42
in our options dialogue. It is just a table that lists all the fonts and what you click is shown on the right side with an option to make it a favorite. It's a checkbox, it's the options part and to disable the active thing,
11:03
meaning if something is not active, it is not shown in the dropdown list. I would also condense the styles, that is my solution.
11:22
Condensing means here is the variations of digital designs with nine different styles. It's just collapsed into one style. And if you want to get more, I'm a little bit too far, you have to do it in a special dialogue.
11:41
What we want to achieve is a small list of fonts that is well sorted and that informs me about my own favorites. I want to easily and quickly find what I'm looking for and what is being replaced. That is, again, what I told you before,
12:02
it's a warning sign here, it's a different icon. And way too small to read, but the style variation, as I said, is accessible in the character dialogue, so I would make it easy. I would make this dropdown as easy as possible. And if you want to go with
12:23
Deja Vu, Sans, Condense, Special, Number 3, you have to go in the character style dialogue or you just enter it. Maybe that could work as well. Sort order should be kept. The favorites get a favorite indicator and icon.
12:41
Non-active fonts should be hidden in the list and non-local fonts could be activated as non-active by default. So if you run a Chinese installation, you probably set the, I don't know, Cantarell font as non-active by default.
13:06
Seen the 10 minutes left. There's one, hey, it was quite fast. There's one button here, Add Fonts, and that is a requirement
13:22
which comes from the installation thing. Design team talks a lot about what is to replace and do we ship the liberation, the open Sans and Noto and whatever. Things change and I think we should not talk about these aspects.
13:42
We should not deal with font management at all. It is up to the user. But if the user wants to install a font, we should make it very easy. And that is this Add Font. It is kind of get hot new stuff known from KDE. Click the button, you get a short dialogue
14:02
which lists extensions, in this case, font extensions on our extension side or whatever. And you get a quick access and order to install it onto your system. The clue here is that the addition of this extension,
14:24
in this case, additional fonts, is placed where you work with the things. And this tight connection between the program and the extension side, that's important. So this management is kind of my pet.
14:41
Next step here is I think it is clear that you should be able to manipulate the substitution table. That's the second tab here in this configuration dialogue. And it shows again what you, it does not add anything new.
15:02
You have a screen only and screen printer. It's possible today. And it's some weird way to, there's a third option, all three, or I don't remember. It's nothing new except to preview how it looks
15:20
if you replace it. And of course, you should be able to manipulate the replacement table. I believe, yeah. That's a picture from today in our bug tracker. I don't know the him on TF9 1130. And his proposal is to not have a dropdown.
15:42
I didn't find a better place for it. Just put it onto the end. It is a brand new proposal. Not what, not my proposal. Left column shows the used fonts and his request is, why do we need to have just one dropdown, one small list?
16:03
There's plenty of space on the UI and we can have more columns in a certain way sorted so that, yeah, I think it's clear what the idea is. Show more on the screen. To summarize, we need improvements
16:20
on the font substitution, an info bar, the substitution table should be more easily accessible, the dropdown could receive some, would need some love and the preview is really nice to have. That's actually what the user want. We need means to hide and highlight fonts,
16:43
hide unused highlight favorites, should go into the options dialogue and the font selection dropdowns, all these stuff has to be reworked kind of and the last thing, the font extension thing so that we can, that the user is not,
17:05
that we do not need to ship fonts. That's all. Thank you.
17:37
You, we install fonts in this,
17:40
yeah, the rationale behind why to not install fonts is questions, challenge, yes? We install fonts in a certain way. Also in our user directory and the fonts that we install are not available on the system so if you are on Linux and you use a packet manager,
18:04
you have two different ways to install stuff. It's a problem to me, I don't like it and the other part is we ship fonts ourselves and probably spam users with unwanted stuff
18:23
and the user cannot get rid of it. Let's say you don't like the Google stuff and you don't like Noto, what do you have to do? It is not that easy to find the right place to delete the file. That's, I have to admit, it's rather my personal idea.
18:43
I want to have a smaller base system and easy ways to extend it. There's font config and there are some
19:00
substitution rules already. I think more or less substitution rules already and so. Yeah, that's how it works today. Font config is the first step. Second is that we have a fixed list of association between fonts.
19:22
Yeah, of course. The system configuration which can be overwritten can be overwritten. I think some of these substitutions cannot be overwritten. How do you deal with that? You are the expert in that field.
19:42
No, I don't understand why we shouldn't make it possible for the user to deal with the substitution table more easily that it's not easy to go into the configuration somewhere deep in your system. You have to know that font config exists.
20:00
You have to know how it works. You have to find the right configuration. Find, you have to edit these replacement tables and it affects all applications everywhere. And it feels not really what the user wants. He wants probably for one document the Windows font replaced by some certain,
20:23
or in the other way. User should somehow have the chance to approach the...
20:40
I would generate this list. Somehow there has to be a default list of substitutions. Somehow it has to be generated by default and the user is only able to overwrite the default and the generation is font config. On Linux, I don't know how it works on Windows.
21:03
But yes, a lot of questions around the topic.