2012/1/14 Alexandre Prokoudine :

Speaking of which, there is another thing I absolutely hate about the current implementation.

It's how GIMP currently treats font faces. First of all, it lists all faces anyway, even though it already has bold/italic buttons to toggle. So when you (accidentaly) choose a bold version in the list, the bold toggle stops doing anything.

I agree
The font dialog and the font selector in the type tool options should show only font families; Type tool options dialog should have an extra tab for selecting styles.
Scribus' text properties dialog has a nice implementation of that, Bold and italic buttons can be kept, but they should interact with the style selector (i.e.: changing the style to bold if the button was pressed).
But the bold button itself isn't enough for families with several weights (light, medium, book, semibold, extra-bold, ultra-bold) so the extra selector is still needed.

Maybe this is a long shot, but let me try. Since type tools in GTK applications (GIMP, Inkscape, etc) suffer usually from the same issues, what if instead of developing a type tool for GIMP you design a comprehensive type selector widget for gnome?
As a user, I'd love to see a unified type selector in all my apps. There are some tools that are specific to each application and their workflow, but type, as well as file opening/saving is pretty much the same always, so it would be great if gnome apps had a generic library for that.