gnome-font-viewer default text not visible in all fonts

[Gias Kay Lee]

Binary package hint: gnome-control-center

At this moment, gnome-font-viewer uses "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" as the sample text for all fonts. This however is an awful implementation for CJK-oriented fonts, because for these fonts, what the user would like to see are the Chinese characters/Japanese kanas/Korean hanguls part of the content, not Roman alphabets. In some CJK fonts that have their contents exclusively on Chinese characters/Japanese kanas/Korean hanguls, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" sample text simply appears as a bunch of black blocks (see attached picture). This is nowhere helpful for the user to preview the font's content.

[Samuel Dellicour (smd)]

I would also like to change the default text - so it is a feature request, rather than a bug.
I often use fonts for french texts (which has characters like éàç etc), and being able to change the default text to add these characters would allow me to immediately see if a font contains these characters or not, before installing.
Thank you.

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version.

@smd: Please report that request as a separate bug, thanks!

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

From reading https://bugzilla.gnome.org/675885 it sounds like a specific Chinese sentence is used for Chinese fonts so maybe the issue with characters not being displayed is fixed. We can still use this bug to track the request to customize the sample phrase.

[Seán Ó Séaghdha (seanos)]

The lack of configurability in gnome-font-viewer makes it pretty useless for languages using non-English Latin characters. How can you tell if a font even supports your language is the font viewer won’t display the right characters? This isn’t trivial; it goes to the very point of the program.

It should have both a default string availabe to translators and allow users to define their own string.

[megaus (megaus)]

This bug-report dates back to 2009 (7 years today), but the bug exists from the first day of gnome-font-viewer.

Is it so hard to write three lines of code to load a custom text from a configuration file?

[Mark Jeronimus (mark-jeronimus)]

I found the example strings in: https://github.com/GNOME/pango/blob/master/pango/pango-language-sample-table.h

and the string selection here: https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-font-viewer/blob/827b338762d45535718be637a838a75f8c218f7d/src/sushi-font-widget.c#L315

This means that it should be possible to manipulate the language though environment variables, but I've been unsuccessful in doing so because of my lack of knowledge.