Top-level fonts settings being dependent on selected writing system in "Advanced" fonts dialog is confusing
Categories
(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)
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(Reporter: dshin, Unassigned)
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Details
(Keywords: pm-triage-needed)
While looking into bug 1798229, I discovered that Default Font and Size settings in "about:preferences" only apply to the writing system selected under "Advanced..."
e.g. I previously set "Advanced..." "Fonts for" to Japanese away from Latin & left it there. As part of bug 1798229 I tried to change font size at the top level (Not under "Advanced..."). This seemingly had no impact, but I discovered that it changed the size only for Japanese. Setting it back to Latin "fixed" this behaviour.
This seems a bit counterintuitive that something in "Advanced" settings affects where the top-level setting gets applied to.
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Comment 1•2 years ago
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I agree with :dshin
While I appreciate the usefulness of separate settings per language I think they should be linked initially and only itemize when the user requests it.
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Comment 2•2 years ago
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There is no non-language-specific internal font pref, so it's not clear to me how the UI should change, considering that. There is no way to make the "default font setting" not "just" apply to a specific writing system. Overwriting all the language/writing-system-specific prefs is likely to produce broken results because a font that works fine for Latin might not work well for Japanese and vice versa (because of missing glyphs - few fonts cover all of unicode). I'd be open to suggestions but broadly this seems like something UX/PM should figure out in conjunction with the layout team and/or folks who understand fonts...
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Comment 3•2 years ago
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Agreed, making the "default" setting modify the prefs for all writing systems would generally be unhelpful. Figuring out how to make the UI more understandable is indeed primarily a UX issue, though I think the underlying model in Gecko is also due for a thorough overhaul; I filed bug 556237 long ago about this, and hope that some day it'll see movement.
One thing we could perhaps do, without requiring any platform work or an extensive UX redesign, would be to just add a little more information to the Fonts section of the main Prefs panel. It currently shows something like:
Fonts
Default font [ Default (Times) ▾ ] Size [ 16 ▾ ] [ Advanced… ]
(excuse my fake UI elements!). While I appreciate the desire to keep this panel from becoming overly cluttered, I wonder if we could do something along the lines of:
Fonts
Default font for Latin [ Default (Times) ▾ ]
Size [ 16 ▾ ] [ More font settings… ]
(I think it'd have to go to two lines, because some writing system names are a lot longer than "Latin"). This would give users a clue that the single setting here doesn't necessarily apply to everything -- especially if the writing system has been changed in the Advanced panel, in which case that would be reflected here and they'd see "Default font for Japanese" or whatever. I also think "More font settings..." might be a more helpful button label than "Advanced...".
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