Font Browser

Hi, I regularly use text objects for graphic design work but fonts always felt a bit clunky and manual in Blender.

Blender 5.0 Alpha:

I might start poking around with these ideas myself and open PRs for some low of the hanging fruit I'll point out. I wanted to open this suggestion as a summary of my ideas and to see what Blender UI designers think.

On the topic of "Just use this extension", yes perhaps some extension could already improve my workflow, but I really don't see why Blender can't have nice font browsing out of the box. This really isn't a niche use case or "I prefer it this way" that would warrant a user extension

So first to list the pain points I have with fonts:

1: Manual Variant Selection

You have to pick each variant, Regular Bold, Italic and Italic Bold manually. I don't think I need to explain why that's frustrating

2: File browser only shows System fonts

The file browser that opens to select fonts shows your system font directory, but that doesn't include user-installed fonts. Those are located in the user's AppData on Windows. Don't know about Linux but many distros also have user fonts as far as I know.

I don't see how this could be addressed without building a dedicated font browser window which is definitely more work than just adding some features to the file browser

3: File browser search box doesn't remember

The Search box in the file browser doesn't remember what you just typed in, so when you want to select all 4 variants of some font, you need to re-search that term 4 times.

This would be an easy low-hanging fruit to quickly improve font selection without any major reworks

4: Font preview text cannot be changed

The font preview in the file browser is very nice, but the preview text seems to always be Aabg and can't seem to be changed. This could also easily be added to the file browser's sidebar, but if it's collapsed and hidden this might not see much use. The square layout of the font items also doesn't lend itself to longer text that shows more characters

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Proposal A: Improvements to File Browser

Easier to implement with benefits right away that wouldn't be wasted if a font browser gets built later.

• Remember search term in font file browser
• Add buttons to jump to user font and system font directory
• When multiple fonts are selected, try to intelligently add them to Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic slots based on their file name
• Add option to the sidebar to change the preview text

Proposal B: Dedicated font browser

This proposal is what I'd consider the ideal solution, but is much more work.

• A single button in the text object properties to select a font
• Show fonts from user and system font directories in a single list
• Larger preview text similar to font websites like google fonts
• Variants are all grouped under the same list item
• Fields and toggles to change the preview text and variant. Show fonts in bold or italic
• Show fonts marked as assets in blender
• Search bar
• Favourites
• Offer manual file browsing as fallback. No need to remove this!

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Additional question

With the recent efforts towards putting Blender on mobile platforms, I wonder if font selection is an issue there as well. Browsing a folder of fonts is a pretty PC-specific concept that doesn't seem to map well to mobile devices. A dedicated font browser might help to future-proof Blender for these platforms

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Little discussion on Blender chat matrix.to/

Thanks again to everyone at Blender foundation for making this amazing app!