[kde-guidelines] Typography HIG update

[David Edmundson]

On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 1:09 AM, Andrew Lake <jamboarder at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 3:06 PM, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
>>
>> So users can set a completely different font for menus than for other UI
>> elements? That could lead to some messed-up UI looks, couldn't it?
>> Why do we have those three settings in particular? That seems rather
>> arbitrary
>> to me.
>> For me it would make sense to allow the user to set one dedault GUI font
>> with
>> one default size (as proposed in the HIG) and then have anything else be
>> multiples of it.
>
>
> Just like we got rid of the Desktop and Taskbar font settngs for Plasma 5, I
> confess that sort of anticipated that we might eventually convince ourselves
> to get rid of the separate Menu and Window Title font settings as well. It's
> part of why I tried to express everything in that third column both in
> reference to the current font settings but also to the single General font.
> But I didn't want to try to resolve that implementation decision before
> releasing a typography guideline that could be useful right now.

That final column could be changed to "leave as default", that's
easier as a dev to understand and would fit with whatever changes we
might decide to do here.

>>
>> > Developers should not be doing font*0.8 in their code ever.
>>
>> Why? What problems could that lead to?
>> Does this mean that users should only set the smallest font and then
>> everything else uses a scaling factor >1?
>
The problem it we'll get a mix of smallestFont and generalFont*0.8

This means if the user ever changes their smallestFont to something
that isn't the default we'd see a mix of 2 different fonts across
applications as well as having a setting that doesn't fully work.

> They can update their apps later.

Speaking as a grumpy battle-worn dev, this is a dangerous philosophy
to go down. Once a hack starts going in, finding them all and taking
them out is super hard.
It also means if we decide in 4 years that title fonts should not be
bold, we're screwed.

> I think it'd be worse if they have no typography guidance at all to follow
> until then.

For Plasma it should be in place, we can say ContentHeaders should be
themed as Plasma.Title
For apps, I'd prefer to have the system in place to handle the rules
before we put the rules in.