Font Chooser

Common font chooser - a generic dialog when picking a font in applications.

Designers

JakubSteiner

Objectives

• Specific style. Allow the user to pick a font to be used in an application.
• Generic Family. Allow to pick a family to be used, with some properties of the font to be left to the application/context (weight, slant etc).
• Specialized fonts. Eg: a monospace font

Undecided

• Fine grained control over all aspects of a variable font? That space might be filled with specific design apps. Theoretically a variable font can expose specific attributes such as length of ascenders.
• Personalized. Type choice is very personal, people tend to stick to particular choices. Provide means to curate their personal selection?

Use Cases

• Select a font for a document style, such as headline.
• Pick a font in a limited context (only monospaced for terminal).

Non Cases

• Emoji font selector. Picking an emoji font is the equivalent of widget theme selection. While Tweaks, where I see this being used, might need an emoji font filter, the picking and previewing might need a specific layout.

Prior Art

* Photoshop: https://youtu.be/CDb9TdUEEko?t=10m58s

* Google docs:

GNOME

Constraints

• Various font technologies allow different subsets of features. Variable weight/slant only available in a fraction of fonts available.

• Custom tags/axis is available for some fonts. The default tags are width, weight, optical size, italic, slant.

Discussion

• I've spent some time prototyping this in the wip/matthiasc/font-variations branch of gtk: https://cloud.gnome.org/index.php/s/cd6Kv5DFGXm42iT

• A related topic would be to provide a dialog for tweaking font settings for a range of selected text in a document or text view

Tentative Design

Comments

See Also

• Macos Font Management using Fontbook

• Font View

• Variable Font Overview — https://medium.com/@tiro/https-medium-com-tiro-introducing-opentype-variable-fonts-12ba6cd2369.

• Bug about choosing Emoji font: 787365