Feature suggestion: Fonts Gallery

**tellurian** · 01 January 2008, 07:23 AM

Xtreme has a nice Fonts Gallery, but in addition to that there are some possibilities with the drop down box also, which I'd love to see implemented. Here's a screen capture video (Flash/swf) of the font selector in Serif PagePlus which demonstrates them:

http://zantra.dk/temp/fontselector

What do you think?

Rich

**steve.ledger** · 01 January 2008, 07:43 AM

Hi Rich,

I think it's a memory overhead we don't need.
I'm not interested in anything that uses resources unecessarily.. I have CorelDrawX3 for that.
The Font's gallery pretty well covers it all for my taste.

**MarkMyWords** · 01 January 2008, 01:01 PM

It is a nice tweak, but I would be reluctant to cause any slowdown, if that is the case, as Sledger is suggesting, to save a couple of clicks.

**Jon G** · 01 January 2008, 01:36 PM

These small improvements wouldn't use resources almost all, and defitinely very useful for working with type. We should leave resource considerations to those who actually have some first hand knowledge on Xara's code.

The Font Gallery needs some improvements as well.

1) allow alphabetical navigation in the gallery
2) allow scrolling with arrows and pageup/pagedown
3) add scandinavian letters in the preview text

Collapsible alphabetical sections could also be a good addition.

**Soquili** · 01 January 2008, 01:59 PM

The only thing I saw in the Serif program that is not available in the Text Tool infobar was the font preview of the selected text.

Xtreme's Font Tool infobar drop down allows typing a letter to go to the first font that begins with that letter. The up and down arrow (cursor) keys scroll up or down the list of fonts. The page up and page down keys also work in the drop down list.

**w00dy** · 01 January 2008, 03:56 PM

I use both XXP and Pageplus on a daily basis and I must say that it's nice to have PP's font option but you can get by without it, after all... how many fonts do you use in a document? In total, I probably use half a dozen or so for 90% of the stuff I do, so I'm shooting myself in the foot having hundreds of fonts installed anyway.

I'd agree with Sledger about speed and resources. In college we use Drawplus X2 and altough the kids like it's wizard driven style at a basic level, see what happens when you drag several pieces of clipart onto a page.... page refresh on a half decent machine chokes. Same spec machine and Xara... rock'n roll!

Reading the forum of late, it looks like the world has discovered Camtasia! It's little brother "Snag It" is the most invaluable Xara "add-on" in my book.

**Jon G** · 01 January 2008, 05:50 PM

Originally Posted by Soquili

Xtreme's Font Tool infobar drop down allows typing a letter to go to the first font that begins with that letter. The up and down arrow (cursor) keys scroll up or down the list of fonts. The page up and page down keys also work in the drop down list.

Yes, that's why it's so strange that the Font Gallery lacks these features.

**steve.ledger** · 01 January 2008, 06:43 PM

Originally Posted by Jon G

The Font Gallery needs some improvements as well.
1) allow alphabetical navigation in the gallery

I my mind, the purpose of the 'gallery' is for a visual view/selection of the font by 'face' rather than by name. Your eye is drawn to the font face, not the name, which is what a gallery all about.
And, unlike the font list, is not a pre selector of a font.
The font list on the info bar is your alphabetically selectable font lister.
Why duplicate functions with the font list and the font gallery when they are clearly mean't to serve different purposes?

Originally Posted by Jon G

2) allow scrolling with arrows and pageup/pagedown

Fast scrolling with mouse wheel seems sufficient to me.

If you want more features in a single UI, why not use accesD's (dmitry) free FontSeeker?? He wrote this for Xara users to use for free. **

http://xaraxtv.at.tut.by/2tg/fs.png

Originally Posted by David O'Neil

I'm amazed that no one has caught on to MWSnap, a powerful little freeware program for screen capturing.

I'm also suprised no-one has made mention of FastStone Capture which, up until very recently was freeware. I know I can't work without it.
The most recent free version is still available for download here

** Please make sure your AV & Malware software is up to date as there appears to be a couple of exploits infecting Dmitry's website at the moment (KASPERSKY Web AntiVirus has picked up two trojans)
I have alerted Dmitry to this.

**Jon G** · 02 January 2008, 03:57 PM

I my mind, the purpose of the 'gallery' is for a visual view/selection of the font by 'face' rather than by name. Your eye is drawn to the font face, not the name, which is what a gallery all about.
And, unlike the font list, is not a pre selector of a font.
The font list on the info bar is your alphabetically selectable font lister.
Why duplicate functions with the font list and the font gallery when they are clearly mean't to serve different purposes?

Alphabetical navigation is standard Windows behaviour, not a special feature of the drop-down list. Both font tools do serve the same purpose, by the way. The Gallery exists just because the main tool is so limited visually.

It takes 30 scrolls of the mousewheel to get to fonts starting with B, and I plan to invest in more type libraries as soon as bugdet allows.

Dmitry's fine tool can't change the typeface of an existing text object, and opening a separate program to select fonts (and having then 3 faulty tools to do a simple task) is hardly optimal solution.