Re: Font chooser GtkAction migration

Hi Alex,

I think there is a technical and an UX aspect to this question:

  * On the UX side of things I have a feeling people expect the text
    toolbar to offer direct controls for font family, style and size and
    will not appreciate the additional dialog and additional click(s)
    that come with it. Also this takes the possibility from people to
    have an immediate preview of their change on canvas, making tuning
    around the font to match the drawing much harder.
    One more thing to consider is that gtk's font picker offers more or
    less the same functionality as our "Text and Font" dialog
    (effectively duplicating that functionality) whereas it seems we
    actually have two groups of users: Some seem to prefer the text
    toolbar, some seem to prefer the "Text and Font" dialog.
  * On the technical side of things: How does gtk determine the
    available fonts / the fonts to display in the picker? How'd a
    selection be translated to a font available for on-canvas use in
    Inkscape?
    There are at least three things to consider:
      o We use pango's freetype2 / fontconfig back-end for rendering
        fonts on canvas.
        That might also be gtk's default on Linux, but on Windows and
        Mac native back-ends are in use (I think via the cairo back-end)
        and the available fonts are known to differ between the
        back-ends. As a consequence rendering of fonts on canvas (which
        currently matches the available fonts and the preview in the
        text toolbar) is different from native rendering via gtk (which
        is also used for the "Text and Font" dialog preview I think) and
        sometimes fonts are claimed to be available (but are actually
        not) and vice-versa. This has caused a lot of confusion in the
        past already and might get much worse if also the font toolbar
        behaves differently than what Inkscape eventually renders on-canvas.
      o We taught Inkscape to add additional fonts (i.e. webfonts / or
        fonts from custom non-system directories) by attaching them to
        Pango's "FcConfig" (see commit
        d6c5424f69aeb91cf1cfeba262b5466a42dd95a5). Will they be
        available in the gtk3 font picker?
      o As on-canvas rendering is done by pango's freetype2 / fontconfig
        back-end we ultimately have to rely on fontconfig to index all
        available fonts and at least on Windows this needs some
        adjustments in etc/fonts.conf. Will those have any effect on the
        gtk3 font picker?

Cheers,
Patrick


Am 11.02.2019 um 16:14 schrieb Alex Valavanis:
> Hi Tav and devs,
>
> I'm currently looking into getting rid of the deprecated GtkAction 
> usage in the TextToolbar.  It seems that the only sticking point is 
> the use of the Ink_ComboBoxEntry_Action widget to select fonts.
>
> It should be OK to migrate this to a Gtk::ToolItem, but before I do 
> that, I just wondered if we had considered using the standard 
> GtkFontButton 
> (https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkFontButton.html)?
>
> This would provide a summary of the font face and size, but would 
> pop-up a font-chooser dialog 
> (https://developer.gnome.org/gtkmm-tutorial/stable/sec-font-chooser-dialog.html.en) 
> rather than providing an entry in a combobox.  This could result in a 
> less cluttered toolbar, but I suspect there might be some "clever 
> things" going on in our font support, and I don't want to break 
> anything without asking!
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> AV
>
>
>
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