Consistent font options across all font pickers and reduce need for font bypasses

[jeffreyrb03-gmail]

The font choosers aren’t really consistent across the whole playground, since widgets offers a different selection compared to the costume/backdrop editor (original Scratch fonts).

They also don’t show you all the real options you have, since you can do an easy font bypass by making a custom reporter block that returns its parameter as text and write things like “Pixel” or “Scratch” or “Sans Serif” to access costume editor fonts (and any other fonts existing either on the user’s device like “Times New Roman”, which is not in either selection list) in the widgets blocks. Here is an example of me using the Scratch font:

Getting custom fonts in the backdrop/costume editor is also achievable but is much harder because you have to edit the raw SVG file and put whatever font you want that you’re certain is loaded on the page or on the user’s device.

I think that to provide more consistency and customizability, it would be awesome for you guys to combine these lists so that they have the same options on both and also add more fonts that are already installed/loaded like Arial or Courier New/monospace. To do this, you wouldn’t need to load/install any new fonts to the page (since everyone already has Arial,etc.), you would just have to add to the lists themselves.
So then, you’d be able to use something like Jua or Luckiest Guy in your costumes and add lots of spice to your project. And vice versa with using something like Marker in widgets.

And also for both, it would be great to add these fonts:

• Arial
• Arial Black
• Comic Sans MS, cursive
• Garamond
• Verdana
• Tahoma
• Courier New
• monospace
• Wingdings (Wingdings)
• Roboto
• Google Sans (only available for chrome/google i think but it works for me)
• Calibri
• Lucida Console (windows only)

So yeah these fonts are already installed on the user’s system usually so don’t need to be installed.

[info-creaticode]

@jeffreyrb03-gmail

Thanks for the detailed suggestion.

We try not to change any feature that’s inherited from MIT Scratch, since we want to make the transition from MIT Scratch to creaticode very smooth. If, for example, a Scratch tutorial talks about a font, but the students see a different menu, then it might cause confusion.

On the other hand, we can definitely try to enhance the font list for widget styling. Your list looks great as a starting point, and we will research if we can add the original Scratch fonts into our list as well.