[Text tool] Font face is ignored

[pedropaulosuzuki]

Description
While we're able to select any font face from the font selector, the font-weight and italic-state are ignored. Probably makes more sense to just show available font-families and let italic and bold switches impact font-weight and italic-state (as already happens now).

The problem in doing that is we lose fine control in font-weight. To solve that, it would be better to change the bold selector to a dropdown, where we can choose any font-weight provided by the font-family.

To Reproduce

1. Switch to the Text Tool
2. Create text
3. Select any font

Additional Info
In the video, we can see that selecting "Ubuntu Condensed" font faces, Pinta ignores the font weight and italic state, even if it implies those are supported.

Screencast.from.01-02-2026.20.16.44.webm

Version
Latest git

Tasks

• Allow selection of any font-weight
• Only show font-weights supported by the font-family in the dropdown
• Sync font-face selection with font-weight and italic state
• Change font-face selector to font-family and allow selection of custom variant on another dropdown (excluding font-weight and italic variations)

[cameronwhite]

I agree the bold / italic options feel redundant, but there are other variants too so we'd need to be careful about this.
For example, some of the fonts I have on macOS have a "small caps" variant:

Maybe the bold / italic buttons should just sync to the font face that was selected, as a simpler fix?

[pedropaulosuzuki]

I agree the bold / italic options feel redundant, but there are other variants too so we'd need to be careful about this. For example, some of the fonts I have on macOS have a "small caps" variant:

Good point. Maybe we could add a 'variant' dropdown too? Seems worth it, if you can find the font you want more quickly. Then it would only show those if there are variants that include features besides 'font-weight' and 'italic', and only inside the selected font family.

Maybe the bold / italic buttons should just sync to the font face that was selected, as a simpler fix?

I think it might work as a temporary fix, but we still should do the change from 'bold button' to 'font-weight dropdown' IMO.

[cameronwhite]

Sure, I don't mind the variant dropdown. The only downside of moving it out of the dialog though is that it's harder to see a preview of what it looks like while you're scrolling through the list of fonts, but the tradeoff is making the list less overwhelming :)

The bold button I think we should be careful about though to avoid over-complicating the UI. Maybe if it can be a button menu so the button and Ctrl+B still work the same as usual if you don't care about the advanced options?

[pedropaulosuzuki]

Sure, I don't mind the variant dropdown. The only downside of moving it out of the dialog though is that it's harder to see a preview of what it looks like while you're scrolling through the list of fonts, but the tradeoff is making the list less overwhelming :)

Makes sense. We should probably make the dropdown conditional to such variations existing inside the font-family.

The bold button I think we should be careful about though to avoid over-complicating the UI. Maybe if it can be a button menu so the button and Ctrl+B still work the same as usual if you don't care about the advanced options?

I just submitted a merge request (#1967), please take a look and see what you think. For now, it is showing all font-weights, even if the font doesn't support them. Probably fixable by using Pango's pango_font_family_list_faces(). It handles the Ctrl+B shortcut as well.

[pedropaulosuzuki]

@cameronwhite please reopen, as only one of four tasks was fixed by #1967