[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 151122] Need some indication of font (family) coverage range when selecting fonts

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151122

--- Comment #7 from Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz1 at gmx.com> ---
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #3)
> Because the suggestion in the 'Font list' context is that the drop list
> itself should included those details--they do not belong there in the UI!
> 
> The Special Character Dialog (SCD) is where LibreOffice's delivery of these
> Unicode font coverage issues belong.
> 
> When you are assigning the font is not the time (or place in the UI) to be
> identifying the font to use.

(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #5)

> in general I would keep the font selection
> mechanism as simple as possible 


A single reply to all of these comments...


A font selection dialog (FSD; versus, say, a font choice text box elsewhere in
the UI) is not intended merely for the user to communicate their apriori choice
of font - but rather to allow the user to make the choice while in the dialog.
While its true that this dialog is not a full-fledged "font explorer" - it does
presume to allow making that choice - via the preview area. The idea is that
you see what the font looks like for some piece of text, and make your
decision.

But this has two underlying assumptions:

1. That the font you see in the preview area is the actual font you're
selecting (rather than some kind of fallback).
2. (When assumption 1 holds) That if the font covers the glyphs used for the
preview area, then it covers all glyphs for all of the languages in that
language group you intended to use. (*)

These assumptions almost always hold if you're writing English, and usually
hold if you're writing German or other Latin-based alphabets. But that  is
absolutely not the case for other languages, especially in CTL language-group.

Let's ignore CTL for a second though. Suppose I want write in Russian. Some
fonts have glyphs for the Cyrillic alphabet, some don't. I cannot choose from
amongst a set of fonts unless I know that they are fonts which cover all glyphs
related to the Russian language; and the font dialog does not let me know that
this is the case.

You both seem to suggest that I should first open the SCD and check. That is a
weird suggestion even if it were valid - to use a not-directly-linked dialog,
from another menu, which officially has an entirely different purpose, as part
of the font selection process. But even ignoring its weirdness - I can't use
the SCD to choose between fonts, since I don't see how a stretch of text looks
in a given font; and I can't use the FSD to choose between fonts since a great
many of the fonts I'm offered I can't actually use. And I also cant use the FSD
since the stretch of text presented in the preview is not in my language of
interest.

(Yes, I can first type some text in Russian, then select it, then launch the
FSD, and I'll get the preview I want, but that's cumbersome and newbie users
won't even think of doing that. And there's the fact that the preview might not
actually use the font itself but some fallback.)

So even by LO's current effective standard of what's necessary for selecting a
font, this information needs to be related somehow. In fact, _some_ of it is
already related - by placing some fonts in the Western language-family list and
other fonts in the CTL language-family list: That's a partial indication of
which parts of the Unicode plane are covered by the font family. What is
necessary is additional refinement - somehow - to let the user choose only from
amongst the fonts relevant to the languages they intend to write in.


Stuart worries about avoiding UI garbage. I agree that this is a danger and
that careful thought is necessary. But something needs to be done, and users
cannot be expected to do trial-and-error font selection.

So how about we focus on my first possible idea: 

* Filtering the list of fonts by the choice of language already present
underneath the list: Only those fonts offering all glyphs associated with the
chosen language will be displayed.
* (Possibly) allowing the choice of multiple languages in the widget(s) below
the font list, for stricter filtering.

> If necessary a special dialog perhaps realized via extension
> could give insights to font attributes.

If something is necessary, then it needs to be in LO itself. If it's
nice-to-have it may belong in an extension. I hope I've managed to convince
that LO's own "standard" for what's necessary for font selection also
necessitates some UI change to avoid mistaken selection of
language-incompatible fonts.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are on the CC list for the bug.