Toolbar Styles

We’ve been discussing the future of the Interface tab in the Appearance capplet, and we’d like to “fix” the default toolbar style before we consider any changes. It seems not many people are aware of what these styles actually look like, so to help I’ve done some screenshots:

Text Beside Icons (the proposed new default)
text-beside-icons

Text Below Icons (the current default)
text-below-icons

Icons Only
icons-only

Text Only
text-only

A trial switch to the text-beside-icons style is underway, so that we can test applications to make sure they work properly with this style. Discussion on any issues can be reported in bug 590143.

Personally, I think there are several advantages to the text-beside-icons mode:

* Increased hit area (fitts law) for important buttons
* Reduced vertical space usage (compared to text-below-icons)
* Reduced horizontal space usage in some applications (as compared to text-below-icons in e.g. Nautilus, Evolution)
* Aesthetically nicer than having text for every item

Re: Adding fonts in GNOME

Hylke wrote about installing fonts in GNOME and how there isn’t an easy way to do this at the moment. Since his suggestion was so simple, I got out my editor and spent this evening hacking. It’s feature freeze tomorrow, so I’ve pushed the changes into master and any testing would be greatly appreciated!

Font Viewer Revamp

There are probably a few tweaks to be made to padding, etc. Hopefully I can also work out how to get the word wrapping/scrolling they way it needs to be without resorting to fixed sizing (it’s not as simple as you might think).