Welcome Stojan,
Please, may I add my thoughts.
I am considering applying for Inkscape on GSoC13.
Please do!
Seconded!
- Typefaces' names should be rendered in the glyphs they describe
Some people have thousands of fonts. This might slow down the menu.
Some pre-rendering and heavy sorting and filtering could solve this. See below.
- Improved handling of different variants, weights, styles of
typefaces. (Current implementation is a bit flaky handling this.)
Regarding weights and styles, there seems to be a lot of work to do to properly reign in the fonts selection. When I go to select a font, either I know the name of the font I'm after and I can type it in, or I don't know the name and what I really want is to browse.
This browsing work-flow needs, I think, to be implemented using a tree-type structure. Something akin to submenus where top level would be descriptive e.g. Serif, Symbol, Sans Serif, Comic etc. and from there I can select a font inside. The actual categorisation should use data available in the font definition and is debatable.
Actually what I'd like is something clever where the number of fonts is considered. If you only have < 20 fonts, a direct menu isn't a problem. If you have > 100 fonts in the serif category, then a further breakdown should be done somehow.
We use Pango for text layout and Pango does not have the ability to handle
Surely the answer is to stop using pango for text layout? Even if it took a large project or several GSoC projects to make a full switch. I'm not sure patching pango up when we already use cairo makes much sense.
Best Regards, Martin Owens