Re: gtk-devel-list Digest, Vol 52, Issue 27

["Henrique Carvalho Alves" <hcarvalhoalves gmail com>]

2008/8/17 Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>:
>> The problem here is that "Quick brown fox..." doesn't make sense in
>> any language. "Lorem ipsum..." also doesn't make sense for someone who
>> doesn't know it's a dummy text. A common user would just popup the
>> dialog and say "What means that? I can't read
>> <english/latim/whatever>!". Some users might even get offended.
>>
>> So I tough using the font name and size is random enough to provide a
>> preview with glyphs, spacing and numerals; is a short text; makes
>> sense inside the context; makes sense for international users; is
>> visually informative, as displays meta-information (the font you
>> selected in the font itself). Do you know any case were displaying
>> with the font name would be a problem?
>
> Imagine you are working in a western locale and selecting a font to
> write text in arabic. The font you are looking for does most likely not
> even provide the glyphs to render its name (as the font name will be
> shown in your current locale).
>
> Another example is a symbol font. It typically doesn't include any
> letters.
>
> Using the font name for preview does not work. You could try to add some
> heuristics that select a reasonable text depending on font coverage. But
> that is likely going to fail in some corner cases. So whatever you end
> up doing, you should give the user a way to change the text used for
> preview.
>
> Sven
>

You're right. The current font dialog also fails for that (see Ubuntu,
which ships some fonts for other languages, and the preview just
presents a default "abcdABCDE" text in sans). I too guess finding the
glyph coverage for the font is hard and not reliable. As stated on the
last reply, making the preview editable is better, of course. The
question here: is using the font name and size as preview text a
better default?