On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 7:04 PM, William Klingelsmith <opendl@...400...> wrote:
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.
Just select all text and see the kerns as gaps/overlaps in selection overlay. Not ideal but useful to get an idea.
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.
Yes, but right now we already have Milosz working on exactly that :)
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.
Yes, and that will be added by Milosz too, hopefully.
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.
That is actually not an Inkscape problem, but that of the underlying libraries. I know that most recent versions of Pango do a better job grouping fonts into families. If you're on Windows, try a recent devel build, it includes latest Pango.