GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 143775
font testing string should be configureable
Last modified: 2021-07-05 10:58:21 UTC
This bug has been reported in the debian BTS: http://bugs.debian.org/247087 "The string shown by the gnome font viewer should be changeable by user request, for that one may want to look at a japanese, korean, whatever font, and with the standard english sentence, you have no clue about what the japanese, korean, whatever characters in the font can look like. The interesting thing is that this sentence is localized, so that a japanese sentence shows up in japanese locale."
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 106243 ***
My report might have been misleading. This is *not* a dupe of bug #106243. The problem is the following : When my environment is in a given language, I can't see font testing strings in *other* languages. Example : my environment is in English and I want to see some Japanese font, I'll get the english string, which is useless to decide how Japanese glyphes look like. More generally, one might want to display whatever string he decides to, to see some particular combinations or whatever.
Something neat that the windows font selector does is to detect the script of the font and use appropriate sample strings. the FC_LANG fontconfig tag gives you some of that information ... a list of languages that the font supports.
*** Bug 318929 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
My suggestion is that the font viewer should have a dropdown menu with several sample text choices. For example: Latin text and punctuation (the "quick brown fox" text that is currently the default) European accented characters (a selection of äöåéíñ and so on) Eastern european characters Cyrillic letters Hiragana Katakana Kanji Korean Arabic Custom text This method gives the user fast access to the different properties of the font regardless of the locale.
Created attachment 71858 [details] [review] A patch to allow users to type their own text Here is a proof of concept patch that allows the user to select one of several test text samples or type his own. The code is a bit ugly and exposes some inefficiencies in the current code. For example the code reparses font information every time the text is altered which is slow. These are easily fixable, though.
Do users need to select from different samples? A default sample and the ability to type your own sounds good enough for me. Marking the patch as needs work, as per comment 6.
Created attachment 80930 [details] [review] New patch to allow typing own text Here's a new patch that replaces the sample text label with an entry box. It also caches the font information so it is not reparsed all the time. However for some reason all text is always drawn with the last allocated font. I don't know why. Maybe some Freetype expert can fix that.
To comment #7: That would absolutely not help the submitter of the original bug: What is needed is sample text that demonstrates the selected font. However, the user may not even be able to type the characters in that font, or know which characters are actually in it.
*** Bug 472191 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
See also bug#309745 which is related.
Patch doesn't seem to apply against current SVN trunk. Jens, is there any reason you didn't apply your patch earlier?
Um, sorry, what patch?
Sorry, misread the name of the patch author.
The patch is useless. The font viewer should be rewritten to use pango for the preview. Kinda like bug 346942. Needs a few more pango features that are not implemented yet. In my long-term plan...
-> gnome-utils gnome-font-viewer has now moved to gnome-utils, reassigning.
*** Bug 687933 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-font-viewer/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.