User Experience/ToDo/Product/Font Categories

Intro

Out of the many fonts typically installed on every system, most users will probably ever use only a couple of them. Most are just filling space. Selecting the appropriate font is however a nightmare.

This discussion will provide a more advanced alternative to the font drop-down list.

See also issue 15421.

Concept

The font drop-down list should be replaced by a control (stacked small window) that permits categorising fonts and selecting/displaying only a specific category of fonts.

Font Categories

There are several types of (non-exclusive) categories.

The user should be able to filter the font-list based on at least 2 of these categories. Working with some of these categories will need a new type of control/checkbox that has 3 states:

• selected: display only fonts belonging to the category
• deselected: do NOT display fonts belonging to this category
• do NOT filter for this category: display both fonts belonging and not belonging to this category
  • instead of using separate controls for these options, it would be wise to have a control with 3 states (something like checked checkbox, non-checked checkbox, and semi-grayed out checkbox) as it conserves space

Text-Font vs Symbol-Font

As the name suggests, fonts may contain text-chars or symbols. Users are usually interested either in one or the other, so it does make sense to filter the other category out when searching for the suitable font.

This works fine with an ordinary checkbox.

Serif vs Sans-Serif vs Handwriting

This are fairly straightforward categories. Sometimes, the user wants to select just a font belonging to one of these categories. Having 3 checkboxes for the 3 categories seems reasonable. Graying out the checkboxes seems reasonable when only the "Symbol-Font" is selected.

Proportional vs Monospace

A 3-state control is warranted.

Nwe Concepts

This is where the really new concepts begin.