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Deviousness `anmari has been spreading her infectious positivity throughout our community for over 6 years. Throughout this time Ana has been at the core of all things devious, passionately developing an eclectic gallery, helping organise devmeets, participating in chat events and also recently completed dedicating her time as a Community Volunteer. We are absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for May 2013 to `anmari, congratulations! Read More
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Sta.sh
and its not "jumped". its "jumps".
the reason for that sentence is to show all letters and you don't have an "s" in there
And add some features like adding and removing fonts.
or even a link that takes you to a site where you can download fonts!
Or the font rendering/smoothing settings!
That would be totally awesome!
But it's really awesome!
Reverse the order of the Preview and the column selector. The current design requires you to "backtrack". You view the top portion, then the bottom portion, then the top portion again. If you put the preview on the bottom, you (ideally) make your selection and then view the results. So definitely try to put the widgets in an order from top to bottom that makes the most sense to use/view them in.
I also agree with you that putting the size slider makes more sense with the preview section since that's what it changes.
For the "10pt" part, I would make that a spin button (with the two arrows) and put the units as a label outside the box. So it looks like: [10 ^v] pt
As far as alignment goes, remember that you shouldn't include describing widgets in your justified alignment. So the labels and the spin button on the slider shouldn't count. Your preview box, your text entry, and your column selector should be the same width as the slider by itself. In this way, your labels and such will stick out on either side of those boxes.
As far as enabling/disabling fonts, I would use checkboxes. I haven't done it yet, but I plan to do a nice nonintrusive design for checkboxes in lists
Can't wait to see the next revision
Spinboxes sound great; my goal was originally to allow users to also 'enter' their font size, since I used to actually use Droid Sans 10.5 myself (10 too small, 11 too large).
Regarding alignment... I'd prefer to keep my Preview and Column Selector the same width as they are now, but extend my Text Entry. The question here is: Would it still follow HIG to knock the text entry and the slider to another line as the label saying "Text:" and "Size:"? I'd rather keep the Preview and Column Selector at the same size since the emphasis here is on fitting text into this window. I'm thinking of something like...
Text:
<indent /> [ The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. v ]
Size: <justified_space /> [ 10 ] pt
<indent /> Small ----o------------------------ Large
Would the above be good? My main concern is not enough horizontal space for the user for selecting their fonts and for viewing their preview.
Haha, great to hear we'll get list checkboxes. I'll just make my own 'widget' for it then until an official one exists. It'd be rather useful to have.
Thanks for the kind words and good criticism, everyone! =]
I also agree that there should be a spin button on the size. It helps with fine tuning for people who may not as exact with a slider.
Consider adding a way to add/delete groups. Most designers love having a way to organize their fonts in a way that's logical to them.
This would be a perfect place to have an on/off switch near the preview pane to enable/disable the font like your other commenter suggested. Designers also like to be able to disable fonts that they might use later without having to uninstall them. It's just another level of organization, and completely possible through the font configuration libraries.
I had been working on a vertical layout (selection boxes on the left, preview on the right), but I love the horizontal layout you have. I would suggest dropping the preview to the bottom and bringing the font selection to the top. In my (humblest) opinion, the workflow goes:
Select Group -> Select Family -> Select Style -> Select Size -> Select Preview Text -> View Preview -> Enable/Disable Font, etc.
Thank you. =] GIMP/Inkscape took time to get used to for me too. xD To be honest, some of the flaws here are partially because I'm a GIMP/Inkscape n00b still. ^_^;
I'll probably go with a checkbox list on the widgets, as DanRabbit mentioned above. xD Figured it gave a more 'list-y' feel to the whole enable/disable thing so we could do a mass check/uncheck. I'm thinking of maybe making it possible to multi-select fonts too for enabling/disabling/removal, to make it quicker.
The vertical layout was actually what I originally thought of doing too, actually. I think both work well, but I actually did the horizontal layout originally because I didn't know how to expand the window size of the mockup in GIMP (still got lots to learn on my end
Your workflow idea actually makes perfect sense. I'll definitely be looking at that workflow you listed for when I'm revising this.