On Thu, 2013-04-18 at 13:10 +0200, Stojan Dimitrovski wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm Stojan Dimitrovski, a sophomore from Macedonia. I'm currently studying Computer Science at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje.
I am considering applying for Inkscape on GSoC13.
Please do!
I have a few ideas on improving the current text tool, particularly its user interface and some of its underlying features and implementation.
Here are some of those ideas:
- 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)? Some people have thousands of fonts. This might slow down the menu. We do have the option for a text sample next to the name.
- There should be a live preview / comparison of typefaces
interface which will allow for a better and faster typeface selection. Inspired by typeface pickers like the one in TypeKit or similar.
Good idea.
- There should be a character-preview of a typeface, which will
show all of the glyphs in a typeface that are defined for it (and make it easy for those glyphs to be inserted into text). This is primarily useful when using icon typefaces (like Font Awesome from Twitter Bootstrap fame).
See the Glyph dialog. It might need some tweaking.
- Improved handling of different variants, weights, styles of
typefaces. (Current implementation is a bit flaky handling this.)
Yes, I know there are still some bugs. This section of code was just completely rewritten.
- Implement a system for SVG font typesetting (actually be able to
use the SVG fonts to render text inside Inkscape).
I would love to see this but it is a hard problem. We use Pango for text layout and Pango does not have the ability to handle fonts that are not provided by the system. An effort to allow "User" fonts didn't get very far five years ago (you can find a patch on the web... but it is only the very beginning of what needs to be done). Cairo does have the ability to handle "User" fonts.
- Improve the SVG font interfaces, they really need some love.
I'd like to hear your suggestions and comments before I embark on doing mockups of the interface and thinking about the implementation.
I should also mention that I'm fluent in the technologies that Inkscape uses, especially in GTK+ (2, 3), GObject, GLib, C / C++. I have general knowledge of the SVG standard.
Excellent.
Tav