🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Mar14.134618.12628@phri.nyu.edu> roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
>In <3262@pur-phy> sho@maxwell.physics.purdue.edu.UUCP (Sho Kuwamoto) writes:
>> Ideally, the user would be able to pick a font, and then pick a style from
>> a popup or an h-menu.  If Super-Extra-Heavy-Bold exists, it should show up
>> in the menu.
>
>	Here's a human interface question.  Let's say you wanted to make a
>4-level pull-right menu for fonts, so you can set family, size, weight, and
>slant, i.e. Helvetica 18 demi oblique.  The question is, which order do you
>want to have them?  Like I did above, or you you prefer Helvetica oblique
>demi 18, or 18 Helvetica oblique demi, or .....


Please don't do this.  Honestly.  It is NOT a win in human factors in the
least.

A better approach is to pop up a dialog box with 3 lists (font, style, size),
an area of editable text for a demo, and an ok and cancel button.  The win is
that most font changes require more than one change in the font.  Better to
have the characteristics up front than require several menu pokes to get at
them.  Style changes, which are relatively frequent, should be in the menu
as a redundancy.

It turns out that this is not a hard thing to implement.  I had to do this for
a current project, and it took me all of 1 day, most of which was spent on
little details, like adding a drop shadow around the demo box.

Steve Hawley
sdh@flash.bellcore.com
A noun's a special kind of word.
It's ev'ry name you ever heard.
I find it quite interesting,
A noun's a person place or thing.