It’s probably a well-known for StyleEdit users that when you install a lot of fonts, the Font section of the application from the menu is a pain to use, having to long navigate through the font styles to get to, for example, the colors section.
So, the solution would be:
Rename the “Font” section to “Style”, move the “fonts” themselves to a separate sub-menu dedicated to them.
Some pictures for illustration
Current StyleEdit menu:
StyleEdit menu after modification:
I would probably try to tackle this on the font side first.
Noto does have seperate font files, but atleast for the list shown above the detinction is pointless.
Ideally the noto fonts should be cleaned as to only contain their proper glyphs (no latin chars in cjk…) and potentially merged
That would cut down the list to
Bitstream charter
Noto Sans
Noto Serif
Noto Serif Display (is this still a thing?)
Noto Mono (or Noto Sans Mono)
Well, it’s not about that… selection of individual font styles. Not about that.
The pictures above do not show the case when there are “many fonts”, the problems of navigation through fonts occur when there are dozens of fonts in the system.
Picture, StyleEdit with many fonts installed, for illustration:
Just putting Fonts in a submenu will not stop that list from scrolling off the screen, though. But it will make selecting the other attributes a bit easier, which I think is what @Damoklas was getting at.
However, it is still not a visual aid. Unless you already know what a font looks like, all you see are a bunch of names. I am not calling for those fonts to be displayed graphically in the menu - I’ve seen that eat up far too much resources in other systems.
But we do have Fontboy, and it does let you drag and drop from Fontboy to, say, StyledEdit. Currently it drops the font name, in that font in the current display size. So we are halfway there. Just let it transfer the font attribute without the name, take the font size selector from the settings and put it up front, and you’d have a system-wide visual font picker. Get that working and then, do we really need a per-app font list in the menu any more?
We still need a per-app font list in the menu.
… for scrolling lists good to be had PgUp and PgDn working (and with the mouse pointer: double-click on the scroll arrow.).
We would significantly reduce the number of entries in the main “Font” menu list if we grouped the fonts by family names, in which case the sample image would have only “Bitstream, Noto” in the Font menu list. Of course, an additional submenu would appear, which could also be an optional item in the program settings (for those who have many fonts in the system).
Another idea is to add an “Input Symbol” section to “Edit”, which when selected would open a sub-menu of font symbols divided by Unicode blocks, which would open a sub-menu grid for selecting symbols in that block.
