Caching of the font previews is an orthogonal issue to the widget
layout, but may be worth looking into. In fact the whole subsystem's
codebase could probably benefit from a deep review and look at how to
make it both more performant and more user-friendly. But from what I
recall from when it was developed, that could prove to be quite a big
project.
Feel free to jot down your own thoughts about improvements into a bug
report in Inbox that we can focus brainstorming into.
Bryce
On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 08:26:37PM +0000, C R wrote:
> Is it possible for Inkscape to store the font previews in a file instead of
> having to re-draw them all each time Inkscape is re-opened (and the font
> dialog clicked on).
> The reason is if you have a large number of fonts on the system, it takes a
> very long time for Inkscape to re-draw them all, and in the meantime the
> user can do nothing but wait (nothing else can be done in Inkscape until
> all the previews are complete).
>
> Ideally, Inkscape would only re-draw these previews when fonts are added or
> updated, and even more ideally, NOT at the time when the user opens the
> drop-down font chooser. Seems like something which could be checked when
> Inkscape starts up?
> Thanks for looking at it, Alex!
>
> -C
>
> On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 8:01 PM Alex Valavanis <valavanisalex@...400...>
> wrote:
>
> > Ok thanks for the feedback... I expected that this would be a can of
> > worms, so I'm glad I checked!
> >
> > I'll go ahead with migrating the existing widget to a tool-item derivative
> > so we don't lose any of the existing functionality.
> >
> > AV
> >
> > On Mon, 11 Feb 2019, 19:55 Bryce Harrington, <bryce@...961...>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 03:14:53PM +0000, Alex Valavanis wrote:
> >> > 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?
> >>
> >> Like Tav and Patrick mentioned, there's been a lot of customization work
> >> of the font selector toolbar and dialog, and given that this is heavily
> >> used by our userbase, even small behavior reductions may generate a lot
> >> of complaints. This is an area to be especially cautious with.
> >>
> >> Are there any behavioral improvements that GtkFontButton would provide
> >> over our current widgets?
> >>
> >> Bryce
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >