Linux and application installing

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2010-09-08 at 09:18 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> Just to be clear. When "users" want a to get a new font what is the
> ideal software interaction path you expect them to take to find fonts?
>  It's not clear that app-install is what you expect them to interact
> with. I do sort of expect normal end-users to want additional fonts as
> part of day to day document preparation and I wouldn't cast the search
> for fonts as a power user or admin activity.

I think the font handling is still some of the worst pieces of the
install story, particularly since conflating software installation and
font installation are really confusing from a user point of view.

What you really want as a user is a font browser where you can view the
actual font, preferably with text you want to input. I guess it's
vaguely like having an app store with screenshots, but I think it's a
totally different use case.

I know fonts come in RPMs, but tbh as a user I could really care less. 

The i18n situation is also pretty sad from my point of view too. If you
use pretty much any design app, OO Writer and Inkscape being the ones
which cause me pain, the standard set of fonts that comes with Fedora is
entirely confusing and bizarre, and gets completely in the way of
actually trying to design text.

Using the same tool/UI for all these different cases is pretty obviously
wrong in my opinion. It would rock hard if you could use the same Font
Store (or whatever you call it) to install this-user-only fonts into
~/.fonts (or whichever folder it is) so that it's not something which
necessarily has to use PackageKit to install stuff. 

Ta

Alex.


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