#146 add child-friendly fonts

[campanula]

First, thanks for a wonderful program! There's a similar feature request already, but I couldn't find how to add support to it or further comments, so I've had to start a new one.

It would be really nice to have a font nearer to handwriting for the wording in the interface and/or in the 'text' font options. A suitable font would be SIL Andika Basic, which is designed for literacy work. My 3-year-old is a bit confused by the 'a's with a up tail'.

[William Kendrick]

Hi, thanks for the suggestion. It looks like a good font, and I agree that we should consider using it. In the meantime, you can easily drop TTF fonts into Tux Paint for use in the Text Tool by placing them in Tux Paint's "fonts" folder. (On Windows, this would be something like C:\Program Files\Tux Paint\data\fonts\, on Linux /usr/share/tuxpaint/fonts/, on Mac I think you'd need to crack open the TuxPaint.app folder.)

For use in the UI, I think we might need to figure out how (if it's possible) to convince Pango to utilize the font when appropriate. (Prior to our use of SDL_Pango, when we were using SDL_ttf for the UI, you could simply replace the "default_font.ttf"; I don't think that'd work on Pango-capable versions of Tux Paint, though)

Thanks!

[William Kendrick]

Our font-loading routine in Tux Paint accepts a font description for Pango, plus a specific font filename (when using SDL_ttf). grep'ing through the code, I see that we use "PANGO_DEFAULT_FONT", which is defined in our "src/fonts.h" as: "BitStream Vera"

Providing a means to override this via config. option would be useful for a situation like this (where a user / parent / teacher wishes to use a different font for the UI).

[William Kendrick]

Ditto for, e.g., OpenDyslexia font, and no doubt many others :)

[William Kendrick]

An option to specify a font for the UI (e.g. --uifont ... on the command-line) is in progress for 0.9.31.

Attached is a screenshot with it running as tuxpaint --buttonsize=192 --uifont "Andika New Basic"

[William Kendrick]

Another attachment, tuxpaint --buttonsize=192 --uifont "OpenDyslexic"