[Adium-devl] Solving the outgoing-font problem

[Colin Barrett]

First off, good work. This is a problem we have been needing to solve,  
and I was hoping we could talk about problems in Adium like this that  
are tackle-able from a design and implementation perspective (not  
"group chat sucks"), and this is one of them.

More comments inline.

On Jan 24, 2007, at 3:00 AM, Peter Hosey wrote:

> As we all know, it is currently non-obvious how to select the  
> default outgoing font, change it, or change it back so that plain  
> text is once again sent (as opposed to black text, which doesn't  
> show up well on all backgrounds). Also, the outgoing font setting  
> (wherever it is currently hiding) and the incoming font setting are  
> not together in the same place, and they should be—it just feels  
> Right.

Agreed. The font settings should go with the other font settings.  
Makes sense. Although I could see the case where *everything* was  
split up into incoming/outgoing, but that is a very different UI from  
Adium at present, and I think we need to proceed incrementally.

> My proposal is a Fonts pane of the Preferences:
>
> Incoming message font: […]
>   Incoming event font: […]
>
> [ ] Strip incoming fonts
> [ ] Strip incoming font styles
> [ ] Strip incoming text colors
>
> Outgoing message font: […]
>   Outgoing event font: […]
>
> [X] Send plain text
> 	[ ] Not even styles or colors
>
> The first three checkboxes are self-explanatory.
>
> With the “Send plain text” checkbox on, any attributes that match  
> the outgoing font are stripped. Any that *don't* match the default  
> outgoing font are left in (so that, for example, you can do  
> “foo<i>bar</i>baz”). The “Not even styles or colors” checkbox  
> disables the latter behavior, so that you don't send *anything* but  
> plain text—even the attributes you enter in manually get dropped.

"Plain text" I think may be a bit misleading -- if I set my outgoing  
font to Sand, that's definitely not plain text. I like the behavior  
you're proposing for the checkboxes, just not the language. Maybe:

[ ] Force outgoing font
    [ ] and styles and colors

?

> We could use a “Configure Fonts…” button in the Messages prefs  
> (which would begin a sheet) instead of a first-class pane. That may  
> make it a bit hard to find, though. Documentation and time would  
> ameliorate the problem, though not entirely eliminate it.

I would like to avoid behavior where panes just magically switch from  
one to the other when you click a button. A regular button shouldn't  
activate something modal like that.

The other option obvious option for having a single pane though, is to  
have tabs in a preference pane, which is not that horrible a behavior.  
We currently avoid it, IIRC. System Prefs /does/ use it extensively  
(Displays, Desktop & Screen Saver, etc), though It would be worth  
seeing if there are other low hanging design fruit that could be  
helped by tabs-in-a-pane. That may lend some credence to this pattern.

-Colin