Advanced font management and browsing

[nz366]

Most of the time font selection takes way too much time. Mostly I don't want to use fonts that is installed by different apps and the system. Graphite should have a better font selection ux.

• There should be a dedicated panel to manage font selection.
• Ways to find fonts quickly that matches certain styles.
• Even better a separate modal (something like google fonts UI) to sort, group fonts by available features like languages and weights etc. And hide/enable/disable set of font in a click of a button.

I think these feature is to broad could be built inside a plugin. I hope at least graphite can pave the way for plugins like this.

As a starting point graphite should be able to read a json file for list of fonts graphite is currently allowed to list inside font selection dropdown menu.

[Keavon]

This could be considered as in-scope for the long-term, although improvements to the font browsing panel are shorter term. The Graphite design philosophy is, "would this be generally useful in a not fringe/exotic/off-topic way? If so, that's eventually in-scope, even if it's decades away." So I'll remove the "plug-in" part from your title. The problem with plugins is that it fragments the ecosystem and makes breakage-free maintenance more burdensome. So that's why we haven't developed a technical plan or roadmap entry for plug-in support, even though it will eventually be supported.

[nz366]

After some thought I had another idea. Apps like notion/coda could mange font lists exposed by Graphite's endpoint. Then user can label them group them. Graphite then can simply listen to the note apps and intuitively allow user to select fonts based on those labels. Then it becomes easier to manage fonts in a purpose built program and even reuse in other apps (no apps do this but may one day) then graphite don't have to bear the burden of font management.