On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 7:04 PM, William Klingelsmith <opendl@...400...> wrote:Just select all text and see the kerns as gaps/overlaps in selection
> 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.
overlay. Not ideal but useful to get an idea.
Yes, but right now we already have Milosz working on exactly that :)
> 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, and that will be added by Milosz too, hopefully.
> 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.
That is actually not an Inkscape problem, but that of the underlying
> 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.
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.
--
bulia byak
Inkscape. Draw Freely.
http://www.inkscape.org