This seems to be similar to bug 113051 ...

> Also, the "Language Encoding" stuff should probably be with the other
> Language preferences.

Um, no. The "Language encoding" select the language for which the font
settings below will apply. "Encoding" isn't the right word, though.

Perhaps we should move the entire fonts prefs to the "advanced" tab.

Seth, fyi, in a Proportional font each charater takes up a different 
amount of space - e.g. "i" is very thin and "m" is very wide. In 
Monospace, all letters take up the same space (i.e. are mono-spaced:)

Some better terminology would be good, but i can't think of any...

I dont think we should move fonts preferences to advanced ... they are
quite basic stuff. We should make them easy enough to be used.

As I said in the other bug my first step to simplify this would be to
drop the encoding stuff that is at best (as showed by seth mistake)
crack. We can default to serif/sans serif aliases that will choose a
good font for the encoding. If someone want to change the fonts he
will pick a good one for his encoding. More flexibility is not that
necessary ihmo. And anyway we cant make this hard to use for 99% of users.

The Serif/Sans serif/Monospace issue is a difficult one. Basically w3c
suggest to have these categories (and even some more), and CSS uses them.
I cant think of any other good names for Serif and Sans serif ... and
I'm not sure how to solve this in another way ...
I wonder if any of the w3c spec has been written thinking to the
interface issues they was going to cause :/

Anyone more creative then me ?

Screw the interface issue. What about the English issue?
"Monospace" appears to be a neologism; it's not in any dictionary
I've found. (Except WordNet which has "monospaced font".) It's a bad
neologism at that. Does it mean every glyph is followed by single
blank?

"typewriter", "constant-width", "fixed-width", and "non-proportional"
are all synonyms. (The ones explicitly mentioning width, the important
attribute, being my preference.)

"Proportional" is a bad name too. A fixed-width font may be
considered a font of fixed proportion - always having a certain
width for a certain height.

The terms "serif" and "sans serif" are unavoidable when you're
making the distinction, unless you're really going to trouble
people with "font with(out) little thingies on the ends of letters."
I prefer sans serif fonts for the screen and serifed fonts for the
printed page.

A quick survey of some related topics indicates that sans serif
fonts should be used by people with dyslexia, scotopic sensitivity
(Irlen syndrome), and other learning disabilities and vision
problems.

I don't think the encoding stuff is crack, but I've never seen a
UI that made clear how it's supposed to work. As I recall, I came
upon my current understanding of it by accident and haven't cared
about it since - I can't read kanji, tamil, or hiragana anyway.
The best I can think of for this, given the large number of
encodings, is a second window. Place a button below the rest of the
font settings labelled something like, "Encoding-specific Fonts..."
(crappy label, I know) and have it open another window.
In that window, use a single-selection list in one pane and have
the settings for the selected encoding in the other pane. For the
one encoding that will alter the settings in the main prefs window,
indicate this clearly and keep the settings synced.

(Perhaps more later. I'm getting really drowsy.)

One thing that would help would be to order these by how commonly they
appear. If you don't set any font settings, which font is used?

oh! I think I finally understood how it works.... The proportional
dropdown is not used to select a font, its used to select whether
"serif" or "san serif" is used by default. Maybe we could make this a
checkbox / radio button, so it wouldn't feel like there were so many
font items (lots of similar items make people's eyes glaze over :-)

Does "Always use these fonts" mean "Use these fonts even if web pages
specify other ones" ?

> Does "Always use these fonts" mean "Use these fonts even if web pages
> specify other ones" ?

Yes

How about "Fixed Width" and "Variable Width" instead of Monospace and 
Proportional respectively?

Just to add some data to the discussion, this is what Safari does.
Dave, dont hate me please ;)

http://www.aplawrence.com/MacOSX/safari2.jpg

Created attachment 18279 [details]
Proposed design

Changes:

- Drop the serif/sans serif distinction
- Use default gnome font picker
- Drop minimum font size configuration. I'm really unsure about this
but ... wouldnt make sense to have a decent default ? I think it's
confusing because other prefs apply to the encoding and to the fonts
without a style specification, while this apply to all encodings and
all fonts.

I guess this could be a decent compromise between features/simplicity
for 1.0. And at least it allow us to use gnome file picker.

If we can get an agreement on this soon, I think it can get in 1.0.
The real problem is the serif/sans serif distinction, without dropping
it, I dunno how we could simplify the interface :/
The problem is the case where the style sheet specify sans-serif as
font. What font epiphany should use in that case ? The standard font ?
The fontconfig sans-serif alias ?

Obviously better design proposal would be welcome too.

*** Bug 113051 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

The Bitstream Vera fonts are great.  Distributions should ship them as
the default, so users who are scared of the words "serif" and
"monospace" will never have to touch this preference, except to set
the size.  Users like me will be upset to find that it's difficult to
set the three basic CSS generic font families.

The Proportional field is slightly confusing.  Change its label to
"Default," or change the Serif and Sans serif labels to toggle
buttons, or put a radio button on the side.

Change "Monospace" to "Fixed width," if you must, but the CSS spec.
does use the term "monospace."  With the wide availability of Andale
Mono and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, I think users will identify with
the term as well as with anything else.

Some web sites would be unusable without the Minimum font size field.
 I don't think you can hard code this to a "decent default."

The Language field is confusing, because it's not immediately obvious
that it toggles modality.  Replacing the Proportional drop-down list
with radio buttons may make this more clear.

Sorry for the spam. Reassigning bugs with a target to our next milestone.

Created attachment 19658 [details] [review]
First try to fix this (far from completed)

Implementation and behaviors details are here:

http://mozdev.org/pipermail/epiphany/2003-August/000267.html

Created attachment 19659 [details]
screenshot of the interface

Comments and suggestions would be very welcome, esp before I finish
implementing it ;)

"Always use these fonts" is a little unclear. I had to think a while
to figure out what the alternative was... Might be better to say "Use
these fonts even when web pages specify other ones" or something to
that effect.

Seth, would "Ignore the fonts specified by the web page" work ?
I'm a bit worried the string you suggested in translations could
become too long. Other than that I certainly agree it's much better
than the current one.
I wonder if the colors one should be made similar too. It seem to be
unclear too:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121118

Man mozilla sucks, no way to implement my plan with current api. This
is going to be a pain ... any suggestion on how to improve it without
require style sheets would be very useful.
I think a way to simplify it a lot would be to remove the distintction
between the two variable width families (serif and sans serif). That
would not be quite correct, but both IE and Safari doesnt have this
distinction ... any idea on how they behave ?
I'm not convinced encoding is necessary (the default just work anyway
because font config deal with it and if it's not a prob in GNOME I
dont see why it should be for epiphany).

Maybe we should start beautifying a bit current implementation and
keep current functionalities ... not really sure, no easy/good
solution here.

In IE, it appears to choose fonts for "serif" and "sans-serif" for you.
e.g. if i set my "web page font" to Arial, text in <font face="serif">
will still display in Times New Roman. The "web page font" is just a 
fallback for when no font is specified at all.

Note that IE also allows the user the specify a default style sheet,
which presumably is how you can change the default serif and sans-serif
fonts.

>In IE, it appears to choose fonts for "serif" and "sans-serif" for you.
>e.g. if i set my "web page font" to Arial, text in <font face="serif">
>will still display in Times New Roman. The "web page font" is just a 
>fallback for when no font is specified at all.

Prolly they use an user style sheet for this. Or anyway they do
something equivalent.

>Note that IE also allows the user the specify a default style sheet,
>which presumably is how you can change the default serif and >sans-serif
>fonts.

But a style sheet doesnt allow to change serif/sans serif right ? Just
to specify fonts for particular tags.

>But a style sheet doesnt allow to change serif/sans serif right ? Just
>to specify fonts for particular tags.

Sure you can - 

*[font-family="sans-serif"] {
  font-family: lucida-sans;
}

would change any text (the star matches everything) with the font 
family "sans-serif" to "lucida-sans".

I removed families confusion. I dont think we can remove per encoding
on the short time because of api problems (assuming we want). We can
surely improve it more but I think it's already a lot more sane now.

marco, what extra stuff were you thinking about for further simplifying
fonts prefs?

I think 1.1 design is acceptably simpler. If there are other things
that could be improved/simplified please open a bug.