Hi, everyone!
It’s been a while since I don’t post anything, and that’s mostly because of the university – it is giving me a lot of annoying headaches. When you get to the end of the course, there are somethings that you just can’t handle anymore, like exams. And also, now I’m working too (yey! : ), so it gives me too little time to do stuff that I like.
Every time when I have spare time, though, I try to work on the development of the widget explorer and it’s integration with plasma – actually the last time I did that was last weekend… I did some useful commits, but now I’m kind of in the middle of too many exams and projects at university, so I can’t do much. Sorry 
. Aaron is the guy who’s helping me out with this, so, Aaron, thanks, you’re the man (ps: please pong me at irc someday)!
Anyways! It’s been a while since I’m working on a plasmoid idea and I think it’s time to share it with you. 
It’s a pretty simple plasmoid that I’ve been developing since the GSoC period (well, I didn’t have much time to work with it, since I had a GSoC project to accomplish), and now I’m getting it finally done. I call it Type Tester.
I don’t know about you, but everytime I have to do a task that includes choosing a font type to some certain text, I takes me forever to do it! I copy and paste the phrase I want to change the font a few times and start changing its fonts. Looks like a quick task, but it’s not at all. Then I start comparing then, and deleting the ones I don’t really like, until there’s only one left! Stupid?!
I always thought about building a solution to this problem I have, and now I finally found the perfect solution: a plasmoid to test the fonts! It’s quick, simple, and harmless
The idea is simply to type a text, choose a font size and build a list with this text written with each of the fonts of the system. Here is a screenshot:
(ps: ignore those fonts I have – I installed them when I was little (yes, like 11 years old) and I didn’t know what I was doing back then : )
(ps2: I know, I still have to handle the resizes stuff!)
When clicking in the “-” sign, that font will dissapear of the list. For the future I want to be able to:
- do actions in batch, like erasing the selected ones, or erasing the not-selected ones
- change the text foreground and background
- change the number of fonts that appears on the list per page (tab)
- accept a font point size number input
- name the tabs with the first letter of the fonts names on that list (A / B / B..C / C / D..E).
If you like the idea and want to help me with new ideas, please do it
cheers!
September 27th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Hi Ana,
nice plasmoid. Keep up the good work! I also often have to compare fonts, so from the screenshot, that you posted, I would suggest the following changes:
- instead of showing the fonts just one below the other, put two dropdownlists near eachother (there is much space left on the right side now). If there are 2 dropdown-lists, you can choose font1 and font2, so you can compare them better to eachother.
September 27th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Nice, but why is it a plasmoid and not a normal application?
September 27th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
I’ve done something similar many years back for windows.
)
My suggestion is the possibility to select some of the fonts from the complete list and be able to see only the selected subset in a different tab.
This would allow to make a pre selection of the candidates in a faster way that remove the one you don’t like (useful for large font collections).
(that was the behaviour of my tool
Cya
Kirys
September 27th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Long time no see. Sorry that I’m not more involved in PAB after the SoC – I’m in a mess right now (normal job, I’ve started teaching, dealing with nepomuk…)
PAB looks nice (with some we-all-know-about issues)
About the applet, why don’t you replace the tabbar with a combo box?
Cheerio!
September 27th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I’m with anon here, i fail to see why this should be a plasmoid, seems the typical “i have a hammer so everything is a nail” problem
September 27th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Hi Annie,
nice idea, I also regularly have that task
I would suggest something like the digikam lighttable, where you have a list of images thumbs and two bigger ones which can individually be replaced with one from the icon list. That way you can quite easily compare them until you find the best one.
September 27th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
I would absolutely *love* this plasmoid. Thankyou for working on it. How many times have I dried my eyeballs out flicking through 1000 fonts without blinking in Inkscape?
My main (overly excited list of) suggestions would be:
* Minimise the extra space between fonts so I can see more in the same vertical space
* Add a filter bar so I can see just fonts that have, for example “Sans Serif”. Eventually it would be *awesome* to be able to tag fonts with Nepomuk and filter by these, too. I understand this is probably a “bit” beyond the scope of your plasmoid though!
* Have an option to replace “Page 1, Page 2 etc” with the first few letters of the font names eg “Mon-Tah, Tah-Ver” if the page 1 shows MonoType through Tahoma and page 2 shows Tahoma to Verdana.
* As others have stated, something to compare fonts. A simple “add to list” icon (using the Oxygen bookmark icon) that showed the selected fonts at the bottom/side.
* A “copy to clipboard” icon next to the text displayed in each font. This way you could just enter your text. Browse the fonts. Click “Copy to clipboard” and paste in the app you needed the text.
Thankyou so much for working on this. Thus far almost every plasmoid I’ve seen (beyond the default desktop ones) have been a novelty only. This is one I would actuall *use* regularly.
Huzzah!
November 10th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Hi Annie,
Nice project! May I make a suggestion to you? You can draw some _inspiration_ on Fontcase. =D