On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Josh Andler wrote:
Synthesized font faces... Yes, there is value IMHO.
Can you hear me screaming at you from miles away, or should I try harder? :)
There was a discussion a long time ago about our use of synthesized font faces and it went into territory that I still think no other graphics app has gone into yet (that may have changed over the years). The eventual goal was to do more in-depth synthesizing. Effectively, allow for more/less bold or slant rather than what it currently is (single, fixed amounts). In other words, (if I'm recalling correctly) the original idea was buttons for bolder and lighter which would continue to work, not just be toggles.
The best I can find is a message referencing the other discussion. http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=19520114
Except my suggestion wasn't about using this kind of approach for faux oblique/bold. It was about using it for large font families like http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/minion/.
Regarding Alexander's desire to see something other than just buttons, one could probably use spinbuttons or sliders given that there should probably be artificial limits imposed because the functions get worthless after a certain point.
I still wound't mind a more type-aware approach such as the outlined one, but personally I'm quite fine about the current dropdown list.
Before we get into discussions about room in the text tool controls bar, it's all the more reason to follow GIMP's lead with floating controls on canvas for the primary features of the tool. And yes, I'm going to bring this up every chance I get until someone gets annoyed enough to implement it. :D
Ditto.
As for the whole faux faces thing, first of all I'd rather see some proof that the quality of autogenerated "missing" faces is good enough. I know that Behdad means well, but I can't recall a single typeface that wouldn't need tweaking after applying weight/skew adjustment in FontForge.
It's too easy to gain a reputation of a toy application.
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org