On Sunday 05 Jun 2005 22:13, Craig Bradney wrote:
Simply, your OS will lie to you.
Yes. Many will do auto glyph substitution which you certainly DO NOT want in DTP (they will often show more glyphs than are available within a certain font file). Many are too complicated and the interfaces are inconsistent with the application, especially across platform.
Ahh, font aliases? That's good point, yes.
On complexity of the character selection tools, though, I think that would be a matter best solved by adding a basic mode to the tools, rather than trying to re-invent the wheel.
I don't think it's such an issue anyway: if people are modifying nodes on a bezier curve and managing layers, launching a program to copy and paste a character should not be too difficult. It seems to me that it would be more difficult to suggest a different way of doing it from what they may be used to in other applications. After all, if they need those characters in Inkscape, they probably need them on their emails or their word processor or something too.
Operating systems already supply this functionality, so I think it's silly to pretend we know the operating system better than the people who develop them. That sort of thing used to happen a lot back in the early nineties, with people re-inventing GUIs over and over again. Mostly, it was a mistake. The only time we see that happen often now is in GUI skins. What you get is something that looks cool and might sell more products (if that's a goal), but fits in badly with the rest of the UI experience, and damages overall workflow.
I didn't know there was an ISO suggestion for keystrokes. Seems like a good thing to support.