The Nine Roles

Documentation / Contents - Font Scheme

• Overview of the Font Scheme Panel
  • Fonts and Colours Are Separate
  • What Sets It Apart
• The Nine Roles
  • The House Voice
  • The Small and Tiny Sizes
  • Partial Schemes
• Using the Panel
  • The Scheme List
  • The Role Rows
  • Changing One Role
  • The Buttons
    • Apply
    • Save and Save As
    • Defaults and Revert
    • Close
  • Following the Desktop
• Font Descriptors
  • The Leading Dash Is the Whole Rule
  • When the Resolved Font Differs
  • Reading the Nine Samples
• Point Size, DPI, and Why Layout Holds
  • Where DPI Comes From
  • The Panel Fits Itself Before It Draws
  • Changing the Desktop DPI
  • Bitmap Fonts and the Core Path
  • Looking at What a Canonical Application Will Get
• Where Font Schemes Live
  • The Search Path
  • The File
  • Two Names
  • The Built-in Defaults
• Command Line and Keys
  • Command Line
  • Keys
    • On the Main Panel
    • In the Font Dialog
• Fonts, Colours, and the Rest of the Desktop
  • Colour Schemes
  • Monitor Settings and DPI
  • The Scheme Daemon

Other cards

• Copyright Information

The Nine Roles

The roles are not this panel's invention. They are the SGI Indigo Magic FontPalette roles, carried verbatim.

PlainLabelFont          user data, list rows
BoldLabelFont           section, tab and title bands
ObliqueLabelFont        derived and status text
FixedWidthFont          preformatted bodies
SmallPlainLabelFont     strip labels, rulers
SmallBoldLabelFont      small emphatic text
SmallObliqueLabelFont   units and annotations
SmallFixedWidthFont     dense monospaced text
TinyBoldLabelFont       last-resort tiny chrome

The House Voice

Three sentences govern which role a piece of text takes.

• Chrome is bold.
• Data is plain.
• Annotation is oblique.

SGI set labels in BoldLabelFont and treated plain as the documented exception. Every desktop built since inverted that, which is why they all look alike. Blueprint keeps SGI's arrangement.

The Small and Tiny Sizes

The four Small roles are not simply the large roles at a lower point size. They are separate bindings, so a scheme can pick a face that stays legible when it is set small rather than shrinking one that does not. TinyBoldLabelFont is the last resort for chrome that has nowhere else to go, such as a crowded strip label.

Partial Schemes

A scheme that names only some of the nine roles is legal. The rest fall back to the built-in defaults. This is how a scheme can change nothing but the fixed-width face and leave the other eight alone.

Next

• Using the Panel
• Font Descriptors