Font selection drop-down usability suffers when hundreds or thousands of fonts are installed

[Richard Griswold]

Binary package hint: gucharmap

1) The release of Ubuntu you are using, via 'lsb_release -rd' or System -> About Ubuntu.

Description: Ubuntu 9.10
Release: 9.10

(This is Xubuntu)

2) The version of the package you are using, via 'apt-cache policy packagename' or by checking in Synaptic.

gucharmap:
  Installed: 1:2.28.0-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 1:2.28.0-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 1:2.28.0-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

3) What you expected to happen

a) Click on the font drop-down
b) A list of fonts appears
c) Using the mouse or keyboard shortcuts, quickly select an arbitrary font from the list of over 1900 installed fonts

4) What happened instead

a) Click on the font drop-down
b) A list of fonts appears
c) I can use the "Home" key to go to the beginning or the "End" key to go to the end, but other than that I'm limited to slowly scrolling through the list using the up and down buttons or the "Up", "Down", "Page-up", and "Page-down" buttons.

According to `fc-list | wc`, my system has 1928 fonts installed. With this many fonts, gucharmap's font selection drop-down becomes difficult to use, since there is no way to jump to fonts that start with a specific letter or to scroll to an arbitrary location in the list. The usability could be improved by adding a scrollbar to the drop down and by allowing users to jump to a font by typing in the name. For example, "f" would jump to the first font that starts with "f", "r" to the first font that starts with "fr", "e" to the first font that starts with "fre", and so on.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Feb 4 11:43:34 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gucharmap
Package: gucharmap 1:2.28.0-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=zsh
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-17.54-generic
SourcePackage: gucharmap
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-17-generic x86_64

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

 Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

[Aigars Mahinovs (aigarius)]

I am pretty sure this is a bug in a higher level library that provides the drop-down combobox (GTK?) and that this is also a regression. I clearly remember being able to jump around drop-down comboboxes with a keyboard before, but now it is not working (including 11.04)