Hi Alex,

I think there is a technical and an UX aspect to this question:

• On the UX side of things I have a feeling people expect the text toolbar to offer direct controls for font family, style and size and will not appreciate the additional dialog and additional click(s) that come with it. Also this takes the possibility from people to have an immediate preview of their change on canvas, making tuning around the font to match the drawing much harder.
  One more thing to consider is that gtk's font picker offers more or less the same functionality as our "Text and Font" dialog (effectively duplicating that functionality) whereas it seems we actually have two groups of users: Some seem to prefer the text toolbar, some seem to prefer the "Text and Font" dialog.
• On the technical side of things: How does gtk determine the available fonts / the fonts to display in the picker? How'd a selection be translated to a font available for on-canvas use in Inkscape?
  There are at least three things to consider:
• We use pango's freetype2 / fontconfig back-end for rendering fonts on canvas.
  That might also be gtk's default on Linux, but on Windows and Mac native back-ends are in use (I think via the cairo back-end) and the available fonts are known to differ between the back-ends. As a consequence rendering of fonts on canvas (which currently matches the available fonts and the preview in the text toolbar) is different from native rendering via gtk (which is also used for the "Text and Font" dialog preview I think) and sometimes fonts are claimed to be available (but are actually not) and vice-versa. This has caused a lot of confusion in the past already and might get much worse if also the font toolbar behaves differently than what Inkscape eventually renders on-canvas.
  
• We taught Inkscape to add additional fonts (i.e. webfonts / or fonts from custom non-system directories) by attaching them to Pango's "FcConfig" (see commit d6c5424f69aeb91cf1cfeba262b5466a42dd95a5). Will they be available in the gtk3 font picker?
• As on-canvas rendering is done by pango's freetype2 / fontconfig back-end we ultimately have to rely on fontconfig to index all available fonts and at least on Windows this needs some adjustments in etc/fonts.conf. Will those have any effect on the gtk3 font picker?

Cheers,
Patrick

Hi Tav and devs,

I'm currently looking into getting rid of the deprecated GtkAction usage in the TextToolbar.  It seems that the only sticking point is the use of the Ink_ComboBoxEntry_Action widget to select fonts.

It should be OK to migrate this to a Gtk::ToolItem, but before I do that, I just wondered if we had considered using the standard GtkFontButton (https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkFontButton.html)?

This would provide a summary of the font face and size, but would pop-up a font-chooser dialog (https://developer.gnome.org/gtkmm-tutorial/stable/sec-font-chooser-dialog.html.en) rather than providing an entry in a combobox.  This could result in a less cluttered toolbar, but I suspect there might be some "clever things" going on in our font support, and I don't want to break anything without asking!

Any thoughts?

AV

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