Hello everyone,
Upon reading Alexandre's post about submitting proposals ASAP, I fired off my idea. I would like to use this post to not only introduce myself, but to also share my proposal here.
~proposal~
My proposal for Inkscape and GsoC 09 deals exclusively with altering the existing typographic system in Inkscape. The three primary areas I wish to work on are kerning, tracking, and typeface organization.
Kerning, the altering of spacing between a pair of letters to enhance aesthetic appeal, is implemented in Inkscape currently, but the existing system provides several hurdles to the designer. The first hurdle is the speed in which a designer can apply or remove kerning. The current approach using the arrow/alt combination is interesting, but inefficient if the designer needs to apply or remove massive amounts of kerning quickly. The second hurdle is that there is no visual record of how much kerning is applied to a specific area. This can be frustrating if the designer wants to keep track of the changes he/she has introduced. My solution to this first area is the implementation of a dropdown box in the toolbar that appears when the text tool is selected. This tool would remain unusable until the user placed their cursor in between two letters in a text area. When this condition was met however, the box would show the amount of kerning applied at the location of the cursor. Upon clicking the arrow on the dropdown box, a small menu would appear that listed several discrete steps of kerning which could be applied (-25, -10, 0, 10, 25, etc). The addition of this box alone would alleviate most of the problems stated above.
The second issue that requires attention is the lack of a tracking system. Tracking is similar to kerning in that it adjusts the space in text. Unlike kerning however, tracking works with multiple words/sentences. Ellen Lupton gives a great example of what tracking is here http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/text/tracking.htm. Since tracking is pretty similar to kerning, it could be implemented in a similar way with a similar dropdown box. The box for tracking would become enabled when a designer selected a group of words or the entire text box.
The final issue deals with the organization of typefaces in Inkscape. More often than not, a designer has several hundred typefaces installed on their computers. Inkscape's current type selection box indepedently lists all variations of a specific typeface. An example of this would be the presence of Helvetica, Helvetica Semi Bold, Helvetica Black, etc. This current arrangement makes an incredibly long list that the designer needs to troll through in order to find the face they want to use. This could be alleviated by collapsing all of the different weights of a typeface into one designation (in the example I just gave, it would collapse to Helvetica). A small box could be placed next the typeface selection box which contained all of the different variants. This would make it incredibly easy to pick and choose what typeface variant one was searching for.
I hope you find this as interesting as I do.