Font selector is cumbersome

[Tory Patnoe]

After seeing a friends terminal program running on Mac OS X. I noticed how clean his terminal windows were. He bragged that Apple spends a lot of money on fonts. Naturally I stated that Ubuntu could do that _and_ chew gum at the same time. So off I was to make my terminals as nice looking as his.

After doing the following:
Terminal->Edit->Profiles->Edit->General Tab->Font

Up poped the font selector.

The font selector was very cumbersome to use.

1) No way to view multiple fonts at the same time to get a nice preview. I had to select each font one by one and view in the preview window.
2) No way so view fonts by a name filter (like a filter with the string 'mono' or 'DejaVu'). The filter could even be expanded to something like "sans style:book" which would show me names which match sans and have a book style.
3) No way to view _only_ monospaced fonts
4) No way to view fonts by region (western, asian, etc)

After wading through all the fonts one by one I had what I wanted. Then I wanted to change all the fonts as well.

System->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts

Bang! I had to go through the cumbersome selection process for each one of Application font, Document font, Desktop font, Window title font, Fixed width font.

In the end I settled upon the DejaVu famility of fonts just changing sizes etc.

The font selector needs to be easier to use. Items #1, #2 and #3 above are a MUST.

I'm willing to help out. Just got to get my system setup and learn a little about the gnome libraries.

[Lightbreeze (nedhoy-gmail)]

2) is already implemented.

Could you open Appearance > Fonts, click on one of the font boxes to open to open a dialog, and start typing a font name? If this works for you, and solves #2, could you please update your bug description, thanks.

[Tory Patnoe (torypatnoe)]

The existing "search" is not what I'm looking for. For example. If I start typeing "Dejavu" it gets me what I want. Now type "mono". I want to see "Dejavu Sans Mono" and "monospace" and any other mono there might be out there.

The existing "search" only searches by the beginning of a font name not the entire font name. It also should behave differently and act as a filter. So the list would only include matches not just take me to a point in the existing list. A analogy is using a filter on your email to only show email which match your filter criteria.

I'll update the bug to not use search to use the word filter.

[Ilya Barygin (randomaction)]

Oops, sorry, marked as a bug in gnome-terminal but it uses stock GTK font chooser.

[Vish (vish)]

 Thank you for bringing this bug to our attention. Unfortunately a paper cut should be a small usability issue that affects many people and is quick and easy to fix. I'm afraid this bug can't be addressed as part of this project.

This is not a papercut, But a feature request, Though a useful one.
Also papercuts are for minor issues in Karmic.

 A paper cut is a minor usability annoyance that an average user would encounter on his/her first day of using a new installation of Ubuntu 9.10.

 For further info about papercuts criteria , pls read > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut

 Don't worry though, This bug has been marked as "invalid" ONLY in the papercuts project.

 For resolution of the bug, kindly identify the projects affected and assign the bug to that project, otherwise the devs of the concerned project might not be notified of this problem.