Feature suggestion: Fonts Gallery

[tellurian]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[David O'Neil]

Resource hogging is a sign of lazy programming. That feature could easily be designed so that it takes 0 resources until the dropdown box is open, and frees all resources when it closes. It would take an extra few milliseconds to show the box, but who cares? It would be a nice feature.

...It's little brother "Snag It" is the most invaluable Xara "add-on" in my book.

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

[handrawn]

another nice simple free screen capture program that I've used for a year or so:
http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen

I don't use a lot of differing fonts so I'm easy on that score

[Jon G]

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.

[raynerj1]

All the galleries in general are in need of some attention/updating. If I had to choose between the layer or the font galleries to assign programming "resources", I would have to pick the layer gallery.