FontInstaller (Was: Gnome Article on UI Design on /.)

[Torsten Rahn]

Am Montag, 22. April 2002 22:13 schrieb Waldo Bastian:
> On Monday 22 April 2002 12:45 pm, Thomas Diehl wrote:
> > Am Montag, 22. April 2002 21:25 schrieb Waldo Bastian:
> > > What is the point of the advanced GUI? I mean, there is something to

The original point was that having two listviews next to each other is pretty 
confusing. The common user actually will have difficulties to get the idea 
behind the dialog. He has got to 

- realize that he has got to press a button on the left to install some fonts 
into the right listview.
- and that they will appear on the right listview afterwards.
- and he has got to realize that the fonts that he "installs to the 
directories on the right side" are actually those fonts that are used by the 
system (This fact is written exactly nowhere).

I'm sure that the original idea which I proposed for the  "basic mode" 
consisted of only one listview which lists the installed fonts not grouped at 
all. You would have an install button which makes a "File Open" dialog being 
opened.
Actually you can see dialogs which look like the proposed basic mode in a lot 
of other kcontrol-dialogs: It works this way in the icontheme-dialog, in the 
theme-manager,  color-dialog, Systemnotification, etc. The advantage is that 
this type of dialog is more consistent with the rest of KDE and it's a more 
linear approach.

In addition he will be confused by words like "Truetype" and "Type1". Ok, 
there might be some people who know about "Truetype"-fonts (although my Dad 
doesn't know anything about them - he just knows that he has got some fonts 
installed on his notebook - He doesn't need to know more because he's neither 
an artist nor a DTP pro. Knowing the explicit name of the format is 
information that is not only redundant but also confusing -- If he had to use 
KDE I'm pretty sure that he would phone me just to know what "Truetype" means 
and if choosing it would be a bad decision.)

I'm also quite sure that I didn't propose to hide the "basic/advanced" switch 
on a tab behind this dialog.

> Hm.. I guess the advanced mode needs to have a "make directory" button as
> well then and some way to move fonts from one dir to another. Would ctrl-x
> / ctrl-v suffice for that? That would be a rather hidden option since a
> control module doesn't have a menu.

a file-open-dialog doesn't have a menu as well. I'd suggest to steal some 
ideas (using toolbarbuttons etc.) from there.

Greets,
Tackat

> Cheers,
> Waldo

-- 
Dipl.-Phys. Torsten Rahn 
<tackat at suse.de>   <tackat at kde.org>   <tackat at tackat.org>

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