On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 08:34, Jonathan Phillips wrote:
Will Pango allow us to have a block of text with various spacing and different fonts, styles flowing together? For example, I hope that our implementation of spacing is not only limited to lines, but so that
one
could select/highlight text and then change the selection's font, spacing, size and allow that text be edited the same as our current implementation.
Thoughts...
Our interface for text manipulation is not so good, and what I would consider one of our weakest features (along with import/export). Our shape editing is great and the usability and efficiency is excellent!
Exactly.
IMHO, we need a few features to make our text system production-ready:
1.) smaller text/font dialog that is more well thought out, and dependent on direct editing of text on the canvas. I think we should
get
rid of the in-window editing. Also, we should figure out how to detect if text is on the clipbboard and paste a text object. This is annoying problem. The text/font palette should be wholly moved to the
secondary
toolbar and operate on the selection like the current 2ndary toolbars
on
the shapes.
Just was about to write a post, suggesting this, but then decided to first read the roadmapping.
2.) text inside a shape. I know NJH has this working and is prolly waiting for pango-ification. For design work this is HYPER necessary. Several of my artist/designer friends are waiting on Inkscape till
this
is implemented, as you can then actually layout writings. (to take
this
further, multiple pages of text would put us beyond illustrator and freehand!)
That'd be great! Inkscape could actually beocome a desktop publishing app. I'm not sure though, if that might not bloat the project a little too much. As a gnome user I'm no friend of scribus, really, cause it's qt, but dtp should probably be done by another app. That app could be a fork of inkscape though.
To recap, and this is a point of contention, all font features should
be
selectable with the font tool as a selection of the text (highlighting characters in a block). The text/font interface (2ndary toolbar) will then show the features of the selected text and allow a user to alter the selection. This should also work on a selected block of text or multiple blocks of text. To represent this properly in the interface when blocks of text are selected with different features, then the
input
window on the interface should either be black or have an asterix to identify that there are different styles. If we implement this, then
we
will reduce drag on the users.
Yes, PLEASE!
IMHO I think that our policy should be direct editing on the canvas where possible across new features. The sub-windows are not a good
idea.
Why should users have to learn another sub-interface? If you look at
the
best design apps, they support this concept and I think our secondary toolbar is super good for this, as it can be torn off and exist as a palette as well. Generally though, our dialogues are way too big.
I learned to like the secondary toolbar. But there's still so much more it could do :) E.g. I'd like to see the document settings in the secondary toolbar, if there's nothing selected and the chosen tool has no default settings or the such. Oh, and yes, you're right, dialog _are_ way to big, at least on a 1024x768 screen.
Regards
David