1160456 - Add UI to configure the "fonts for mathematics" preferences

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Bug 947654 will add font.*.x-math preferences options in order to configure the math fonts used for MathML. These should be configurable from the Firefox Fonts preference menu.

Comment 1

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Attachment: Patch

Comment 2

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Comment on attachment 8603341 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

Karl: can you try again the patch? It seems that it no longer works for me. Actually even when trying to set the fonts for "Cyrillic", the prefs are not updated. The only change I see is bug 1166161.

Comment 3

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Comment on attachment 8603341 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

(In reply to Frédéric Wang (:fredw) from comment #2)
> Karl: can you try again the patch? It seems that it no longer works for me.
> Actually even when trying to set the fonts for "Cyrillic", the prefs are not
> updated. The only change I see is bug 1166161.

The Cyrillic bug exists without this patch so it is not a problem with this patch, but a separate bug.

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Did you discuss this with a UX person? Mathematics isn't really a "language" in the same way that the other things in this list are. I'm not sure it makes sense to add the pref in this way, or that it would be discoverable for interested parties...

Comment 5

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #4)
> Did you discuss this with a UX person?

Sorry, I thought you were one, since you reviewed a patch for the font preference menu. I'll defer the review to someone else.

> Mathematics isn't really a "language"
> in the same way that the other things in this list are. I'm not sure it
> makes sense to add the pref in this way,

The point of reusing the existing UI instead of duplicating code and making it consistent with the other languages was actually to make it easier to be accepted... See bug 947654 comment 3.

> or that it would be discoverable for interested parties...

I'm not sure this is really a problem.

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Comment on attachment 8603341 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

I am a browser peer like Marco. Both of us can review the patch. But we're not user experience people. You want someone like :phlsa and ask for ui-review.

Comment 7

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

(In reply to Karl Tomlinson (ni?:karlt) from comment #3)
> > Karl: can you try again the patch? It seems that it no longer works for me.
> > Actually even when trying to set the fonts for "Cyrillic", the prefs are not
> > updated. The only change I see is bug 1166161.
> 
> The Cyrillic bug exists without this patch so it is not a problem with this
> patch, but a separate bug.

I can confirm that the patch works as expected again, after bug 1169567.

Comment 8

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

FYI, Florian added the new preference option to the release notes of Firefox 41 (see bug 947654 comment 81). I think it would be much better if this preference option have the associated UI so I hope this small patch could make it for Firefox 41.

Comment 9

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

Hey! Sorry, I can't do builds on my machine right now. Could you upload a screenshot of the changed UI for ui-review? Thanks!

Comment 10

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

My builds at http://www.wg9s.com/mozilla/firefox/ include this patch.

Comment 11

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Attachment: math-pref-1.png

Comment 12

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Attachment: math-pref-2.png

Comment 13

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Attachment: math-pref-3.png

Comment 14

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

I uploaded a couple of screenshots. So as you can see this is just the current font preference with a new item for "Mathematics". The main question is whether it's fine to just reuse the existing font preference for that purpose or whether mathematics deserve a separate UI. If the former is chosen, then another question is where to put this new item: in the (English) alphabetical order (so just after mayalayam) or at the end of the list, before the other special "x-unicode" language (as done in the patch)?

Comment 15

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

Comment on attachment 8603341 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

Review of attachment 8603341 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for the screen shots!
Putting it into that space makes sense. It would be preferable to put it into the normal alphabetical ordering though.

Comment 16

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Attachment: Patch V2

I'm reordering the language as suggested by Philipp Sackl. This actually makes it consistent with what I did for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.

Comment 17

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Comment on attachment 8621217 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch V2

Review of attachment 8621217 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

If UX is happy with it, this wfm.

Comment 18

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=412af0d878b8

Comment 19

[Pulsebot]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/d83d1212b239

Comment 20

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/d83d1212b239

Comment 21

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

I updated https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/41#New_default_and_fallback_font_handling to mention the font preference menu and also mention it on https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/MathML_Project/Fonts#Fonts_with_a_MATH_table

Comment 22

[Sebastian Hengst [:aryx] (needinfo me if it's about an intermittent or backout)]

Fred, is it desired behavior that the field for "Proportional" fonts, its "Size" field and the "Size" field for the monospace font are empty?

Comment 23

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

(In reply to Aryx [:archaeopteryx][:aryx] from comment #22)
> Fred, is it desired behavior that the field for "Proportional" fonts, its
> "Size" field and the "Size" field for the monospace font are empty?

Yes, not all the font preferences were added for x-math in bug 947654. For example the font-size of the <math> is inherited from the parent (so that formulas have size consistent with the surrounding text) and font-family=monospace or font-family=sans-serif are rarely used for math formulas (or if they are, it's via the Unicode characters from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbols). Perhaps some specific code should be added to ignore irrelevant fields for x-math