I understand that we need to fit a lot of stuff there, but I'm not very excited about having the kern and spacing controls in a drop-down.
Oh? I agree about the spacing, but I admit I rarely use kerning. Also, kerning is easier via keyboard shortcuts. I could be missing categories of users though (sorry!)
I think they are quite fundamental and quite often used - more often than text in shape IMHO
Text in shape is for charts, because 60% of the time, when I bring up the Align panel, it's to align a few lines of text into one chart shape (and I have to redo the process if I make any modifications to the text).
Now, I'm pretty sure that people do charts a lot more frequently than kerning letters. ;)
Apart from two clicks, drop-downs like those you have drawn have other problems: 1) they are not exactly a stock gtk widget and may be hard to implement;
Darn.
- they obscure part of the
canvas which, after they are closed, needs to redraw itself, which may be annoyingly slow in complex documents.
Slower than bringing up the align panel all the time, as is what I have to do right now?
Alright, in this case, how about the following: - I put all the text style elements onto the text toolbar - I design a Separate tool whose purpose is to take a shape, take a text, and flow the text into it (with automatic padding, alignment, etc.) to make it a proper chart item that updates itself (for alignment and padding)?
Text on path can be either either another tool, included in this tool, or like right now only available from drop-downs and shortcuts?
Sure, it adds another tool or two, but that's why I proposed toolbox management. :P
(as for why I don't add the functionality directly to Rectangle, Ellipse and Polygon, that's because people may want to make custom shapes...)