Re: Font chooser GtkAction migration

Caching of the font previews is an orthogonal issue to the widget
layout, but may be worth looking into.  In fact the whole subsystem's
codebase could probably benefit from a deep review and look at how to
make it both more performant and more user-friendly.  But from what I
recall from when it was developed, that could prove to be quite a big
project.

Feel free to jot down your own thoughts about improvements into a bug
report in Inbox that we can focus brainstorming into.

Bryce

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 08:26:37PM +0000, C R wrote:
> Is it possible for Inkscape to store the font previews in a file instead of
> having to re-draw them all each time Inkscape is re-opened (and the font
> dialog clicked on).
> The reason is if you have a large number of fonts on the system, it takes a
> very long time for Inkscape to re-draw them all, and in the meantime the
> user can do nothing but wait (nothing else can be done in Inkscape until
> all the previews are complete).
> 
> Ideally, Inkscape would only re-draw these previews when fonts are added or
> updated, and even more ideally, NOT at the time when the user opens the
> drop-down font chooser. Seems like something which could be checked when
> Inkscape starts up?
> Thanks for looking at it, Alex!
> 
> -C
> 
> On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 8:01 PM Alex Valavanis <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> 
> > Ok thanks for the feedback... I expected that this would be a can of
> > worms, so I'm glad I checked!
> >
> > I'll go ahead with migrating the existing widget to a tool-item derivative
> > so we don't lose any of the existing functionality.
> >
> > AV
> >
> > On Mon, 11 Feb 2019, 19:55 Bryce Harrington, <[email protected]>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 03:14:53PM +0000, Alex Valavanis wrote:
> >> > 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?
> >>
> >> Like Tav and Patrick mentioned, there's been a lot of customization work
> >> of the font selector toolbar and dialog, and given that this is heavily
> >> used by our userbase, even small behavior reductions may generate a lot
> >> of complaints.  This is an area to be especially cautious with.
> >>
> >> Are there any behavioral improvements that GtkFontButton would provide
> >> over our current widgets?
> >>
> >> Bryce
> >>
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