"Quick Search" and "Tag Search" always search the entire library

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nabsltd
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Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2016 12:35 am

"Quick Search" and "Tag Search" always search the entire library

Post by nabsltd »

If you have a view or group selected, Quick Search still returns results from the entire library.

Although this may be "by design", I'd call it a bug, since this means that if you have thousands of fonts in a view or group, the only way to find one font in that view or group is to scroll for a long time.

Perhaps the best way to deal with this is an option that changes the behavior to search only the selected view/group, and then users who currently don't mind scrolling a lot can keep doing it.
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: "Quick Search" and "Tag Search" always search the entire library

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

It is clearly not a bug, whatever you want to call it. Quick search is designed to search the entire database, and it does its job very well. If you narrow down the search by typing more of the name, I cannot imagine that you will still have thousands of fonts to scroll through. Just how many versions of Garamond are there for example?

I found it easy to locate tagged fonts in my short list of fonts with the search string "gara"
Quick Search Tagged Fonts.png
Quick Search Tagged Fonts.png (51.17 KiB) Viewed 6294 times
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nabsltd
Posts: 132
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2016 12:35 am

Re: "Quick Search" and "Tag Search" always search the entire library

Post by nabsltd »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:It is clearly not a bug, whatever you want to call it. Quick search is designed to search the entire database, and it does its job very well.
As I said, although it was likely intentional, but it's not very intuitive.

If have been working with a subset of fonts (like a view or a group), and you search using any method, showing fonts not in that group is just unexpected, at least as far as any other program in the universe is concerned. For example, when you type something in the search box in an Explorer window, what if it showed files not below the subdirectory structure you are currently looking at?

Also, sometimes it's the only way to find the font you want...like you have a view group or tag search for some special feature (Monospace, Slab, etc.), and then want to find out if you have something that somebody called "Garamond" in that view. Sure, you could do a quick search for Garamond, tag all the fonts with a "QuickSearch" tag, then do a tag search for "QuickSearch" plus "Monospace", but again, is that really how people work?
I cannot imagine that you will still have thousands of fonts to scroll through.
OK, so hundreds, if you are searching for something like "noto" for Google's fonts. If you already are in a view that has narrowed it down, then that search might only show 3 fonts. On the other hand, the entire database has nearly 200. And, I'm not a huge "collect every font I find anywhere" kind of guy like some people, but my 6268 font database has 103 fonts named "Garamond". At 14 point preview, that's still 3 screens full. For people with 20-30K fonts, they might have 500 with "Garamond" in the name.
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Re: "Quick Search" and "Tag Search" always search the entire library

Post by Erwin Denissen »

We'll add this to the to-do list.
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