New system-wide font category: handwritten

There’s a wishlist report for the Notes desktop widget suggesting a custom font selection:

I assume this is most likely supposed meant to enable handwritten/scribbled typefaces to complement the ‘sticky notes’ skeuomorph.

While thinking about how this could be implemented, I felt like it’d not be very elegant to implement a custom font setting just for that notes widget alone. It should probably be something system-wide so other applications can respect our choice of handwritten font too.

Right now, there are six categories of fonts we can customise in our system settings:

  • general
  • fixed width
  • small
  • toolbars
  • menus
  • window titles.

My perhaps naive solution to this would be adding a new category: handwritten/stylish. This could not only benefit the sticky notes, but also other skeuomorphic representations of manually written text.

I do lack knowledge about the inner workings of the font management though; that’s why I’m writing this forum thread instead of submitting a suggestion to the bug tracker.

For example, are these font categories standardised? Are they a part of Qt? Is it some Freedesktop or ISO thing?

Comments would be greatly appreciated.