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To be fair, that's how they should be displayed. I don't select a font based on its name, I select it based on its look.
by bena 3y ago
To be fair, that's how they should be displayed. I don't select a font based on its name, I select it based on its look.
- _jal 3y agoProfessional designers, on the other hand, need to care not just about typeface and foundry, but also about the exact version of fonts. Back when magazines weren't nearly dead, I did production for a few years. The very first issue I worked on, I screwed up an ad by using a newer version of the font - the leading tables were different and a text block wrapped when it shouldn't have, so the advertiser got a couple free runs. Always turned off rendering in lists and menus where I could, because it was not useful, slow, and harder to read.
- dylan604 3y agoI think this update to the fonts list was from some PHB instead of being requests from users. Some manager decided that the UI needed to be updated and tweaked because it was working, and we can't just let that happen
- kstrauser 3y agoSame, but the software could: 1. Optimize for rendering the on-screen fonts first, then fill in the rest after the user’s starting looking at them. 2. Cache the preview. If it takes longer to render the sample text than to load a png, save the rendering so you can load it again next time.
- dclowd9901 3y agoIt’s such a common idiom that fonts should have some kind of optimized “header” or something that can make it previewable but quick
- Clamchop 3y agoI think for this to be generally effective for Windows software, developers on the whole not being consistent or wanting to invest the effort in little bits of polish like that, they would need an API into a system-wide implementation. Which they could do, but it would take forever to see adoption in Windows culture, and Microsoft evidently cannot, just cannot, get their UI shit together.
- dylan604 3y agoTo be fair, I don't care what the name of the font looks like in the font itself. I want to see the text I have selected updated with the font selected in the list.
- m2fkxy 3y agowell it also works this way.
- dylan604 3y agowell, this is how it should work. this "new" showing the name of the font in the font in the list is reeks from someone that had an idea, developed, tested on a system with standard fonts installed, AKA a small number of fonts, compared to someone that has a long list of fonts. Some PHB accepted it, and it got deployed only to be met by the crushing realities of users large set of installed fonts.
- bena 3y agoUltimately, yes, that's what I want to see. But "Garamond" in the blind tells me nothing about how that will make my text look. So if I can see it before rendering all of my text in it, that's not unwelcome.
- layer8 3y agoTwo problems are that (1) the font name isn’t always very suitable to give a good impression of the font, and (2) for some fonts (symbol fonts, very ornate fonts, very small fonts) it can make the font name unreadable. A better solution for the use-case of selecting fonts by looks is a dedicated font selection dialog that shows both the font name and a customizable example text in the font, and also lets you control the font size and variant (bold, italic). Some applications do exactly that.