I'd like to thank all of you for providing your input. Shows that the text tool needs improvement.
Firstly, I believe I wasn't clear enough. I'm thinking primarily on reworking the text-tool dialogs and such (almost anything under the Text menu). Not so much the toolbar of the text tool, although I see some improvements that can be made there also.
Responses inline:
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 2:30 PM, Tavmjong Bah <tavmjong@...8...> wrote:
- Typefaces' names should be rendered in the glyphs they describe
if such exist. Example: Helvetica should be rendered in Helvetica, Garamond in Garamond, etc. Icon typefaces are rendered by the fallback GUI typeface on the system.
I am not so sure about this one. What if the typeface doesn't include the glyphs (say a Hindi font)?
There are, of course, ways around this that can properly clarify the situation for the user. I'm thinking that it would probably be much wiser to have the name of the font (system typeface) displayed alongside of a sample text of the font. There can and should be a subset analysis done to see which characters the font allows for, and have the display text set according to that and the user's locale. If all else fails, the display of the typeface can just be a standard list of glyphs (icon typefaces).
Such an example would be, say having the text: Good morning, הבוקר טוב (Hebrew for Good morning), Добро утро (Macedonian), καλημέρα (Greek).
According to the subset of the glyphs supported by the typeface and the user's locale we could have: a full LGC typeface would display either Good morning, καλημέρα or Добро утро to a user that has their locale set to the languages of that text. If the typeface supports a subset of LGC Inkscape could, for example, choose the more appropriate text for that subset disregarding the locale, and if that fails, we can have glyphs shown as they appear in the character set of the typeface.
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 3:00 PM, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
Some people have thousands of fonts. This might slow down the menu.
Some pre-rendering and heavy sorting and filtering could solve this.
Yes, this feature will probably not work for the menu. Pre-rendering and other smarts can only help, but I doubt it that those will be useful. I wouldn't add such a feature to the text tool font selection menu in the toolbar. A far better idea would be to have a preview, either in the toolbar (not a personal favorite, has issues), as a popup window on item hover (useful, but maybe distracting) displaying sample text or sample text from the current selected text element being edited, or an immediate preview on hover inside the Inkscape document (may be somewhat slow).
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 3:00 PM, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
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.
I agree, and this is pretty much what I had in mind.
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.
Pango does have limitations, but the truth is we don't need to handle user fonts. We need to handle system fonts (fonts in ~/.fonts are system fonts), of which Pango does a remarkably great job. Now, on that note there could probably be more intense work in the field of opening font files and reading them on our own to probably extract more information. I will need to research this further.
For now, I think Pango satisfies the needs.
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 5:15 PM, Terry Brown <terry_n_brown@...36...> wrote:
On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:03:01 -0700 (PDT) Valerie <valerie_vk@...36...> wrote:
Fonts would be stored in categories, and within categories, you can check a box to make the font appear in the "favourites" category on top. Uncheck to make it disappear again.
Maybe tags instead of categories? Fonts will occur in many categories (heavy, bold, antique, cursive, festive, etc.) so while each font could occur multiple times, in different categories, an interface which used tags rather than categories would make it easier to find "heavy, antique, cursive" fonts for example.
Yes, this is a great idea!
Again, thank you all for the suggestions!
Regards, Stojan