Pango synthesizes Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic faces when they are not available on the system. Inkscape displays these styles in the UI. I can see a use for the synthesized Italic faces (actually Oblique) but I wonder how useful the synthesized Bold faces really are (it is not a trivial thing to do well). At the moment synthesized Bold faces are listed in the Style menus in the Text toolbar and the Text and Font dialog, and they are displayed in the Text and Font dialog preview area but they are not used on the canvas (probably a difference in how they are displayed, the former uses Pango markup in a Gtk widget while the latter is rendered by Cairo).
Question: is it worth trying to get Cairo to render the synthesized Bold faces or should they be removed from the UI. What about the synthesized Italic faces?
As an aside, I am struggling to understand how Pango handles font faces... mapping font names to family names and styles. For example, Impact which fc-list reports as Regular or Normal ends up having the style "Condensed"; the synthesized versions don't include "Condensed".
Tav
Synthesized font faces... Yes, there is value IMHO. So, while I'd throw out a vote in favor of getting Cairo to show it on canvas that is because of the following...
There was a discussion a long time ago about our use of synthesized font faces and it went into territory that I still think no other graphics app has gone into yet (that may have changed over the years). The eventual goal was to do more in-depth synthesizing. Effectively, allow for more/less bold or slant rather than what it currently is (single, fixed amounts). In other words, (if I'm recalling correctly) the original idea was buttons for bolder and lighter which would continue to work, not just be toggles.
The best I can find is a message referencing the other discussion. http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=19520114
Regarding Alexander's desire to see something other than just buttons, one could probably use spinbuttons or sliders given that there should probably be artificial limits imposed because the functions get worthless after a certain point.
Before we get into discussions about room in the text tool controls bar, it's all the more reason to follow GIMP's lead with floating controls on canvas for the primary features of the tool. And yes, I'm going to bring this up every chance I get until someone gets annoyed enough to implement it. :D
Cheers, Josh
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 3:58 AM, Tavmjong Bah <tavmjong@...8...> wrote:
Pango synthesizes Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic faces when they are not available on the system. Inkscape displays these styles in the UI. I can see a use for the synthesized Italic faces (actually Oblique) but I wonder how useful the synthesized Bold faces really are (it is not a trivial thing to do well). At the moment synthesized Bold faces are listed in the Style menus in the Text toolbar and the Text and Font dialog, and they are displayed in the Text and Font dialog preview area but they are not used on the canvas (probably a difference in how they are displayed, the former uses Pango markup in a Gtk widget while the latter is rendered by Cairo).
Question: is it worth trying to get Cairo to render the synthesized Bold faces or should they be removed from the UI. What about the synthesized Italic faces?
As an aside, I am struggling to understand how Pango handles font faces... mapping font names to family names and styles. For example, Impact which fc-list reports as Regular or Normal ends up having the style "Condensed"; the synthesized versions don't include "Condensed".
Tav
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On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Josh Andler wrote:
Synthesized font faces... Yes, there is value IMHO.
Can you hear me screaming at you from miles away, or should I try harder? :)
There was a discussion a long time ago about our use of synthesized font faces and it went into territory that I still think no other graphics app has gone into yet (that may have changed over the years). The eventual goal was to do more in-depth synthesizing. Effectively, allow for more/less bold or slant rather than what it currently is (single, fixed amounts). In other words, (if I'm recalling correctly) the original idea was buttons for bolder and lighter which would continue to work, not just be toggles.
The best I can find is a message referencing the other discussion. http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=19520114
Except my suggestion wasn't about using this kind of approach for faux oblique/bold. It was about using it for large font families like http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/minion/.
Regarding Alexander's desire to see something other than just buttons, one could probably use spinbuttons or sliders given that there should probably be artificial limits imposed because the functions get worthless after a certain point.
I still wound't mind a more type-aware approach such as the outlined one, but personally I'm quite fine about the current dropdown list.
Before we get into discussions about room in the text tool controls bar, it's all the more reason to follow GIMP's lead with floating controls on canvas for the primary features of the tool. And yes, I'm going to bring this up every chance I get until someone gets annoyed enough to implement it. :D
Ditto.
As for the whole faux faces thing, first of all I'd rather see some proof that the quality of autogenerated "missing" faces is good enough. I know that Behdad means well, but I can't recall a single typeface that wouldn't need tweaking after applying weight/skew adjustment in FontForge.
It's too easy to gain a reputation of a toy application.
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 12:25 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
As for the whole faux faces thing, first of all I'd rather see some proof that the quality of autogenerated "missing" faces is good enough. I know that Behdad means well, but I can't recall a single typeface that wouldn't need tweaking after applying weight/skew adjustment in FontForge.
It's too easy to gain a reputation of a toy application.
Also, try to think of it in terms of compatibility. What happens when you save an EPS or an SVG from Inkscape that uses an autogenerated typeface? Will Adobe Illustrator users be able to open it correctly?
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org
On Tue, 2013-03-05 at 00:28 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 12:25 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
As for the whole faux faces thing, first of all I'd rather see some proof that the quality of autogenerated "missing" faces is good enough. I know that Behdad means well, but I can't recall a single typeface that wouldn't need tweaking after applying weight/skew adjustment in FontForge.
It's too easy to gain a reputation of a toy application.
Also, try to think of it in terms of compatibility. What happens when you save an EPS or an SVG from Inkscape that uses an autogenerated typeface? Will Adobe Illustrator users be able to open it correctly?
Yes, there is that too. I think the use of faux faces is more interesting for browsers where one may need to handle missing font faces or even individual glyphs since what people have installed on their systems is different (I saw a Mozilla(?) bug report where the Chinese bold glyphs were missing when the other glyphs were all bold). But in a design program, I think one wants only genuine font faces. My inclination is to disable faux faces in the UI.
Tav
On Tue, 2013-03-05 at 00:25 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Josh Andler wrote:
Synthesized font faces... Yes, there is value IMHO.
Can you hear me screaming at you from miles away, or should I try harder? :)
As for the whole faux faces thing, first of all I'd rather see some proof that the quality of autogenerated "missing" faces is good enough. I know that Behdad means well, but I can't recall a single typeface that wouldn't need tweaking after applying weight/skew adjustment in FontForge.
It's too easy to gain a reputation of a toy application.
Taking a close look at the faux bold faces... the quality is really pretty poor. I can also imagine that there could be licensing issues for non-free fonts. What designer wants to see their work perverted?
Tav
I can imagine many users would miss the auto generated font styles, even if they have poor quality.
I think it should be very clear to the user which font styles are only generated. Their entries could e.g. be colored in light gray or have a warning icon next to them.
Cheers, vaifrax
On Mon, 2013-03-04 at 21:45 +0100, vaifrax wrote:
I can imagine many users would miss the auto generated font styles, even if they have poor quality.
I think it should be very clear to the user which font styles are only generated. Their entries could e.g. be colored in light gray or have a warning icon next to them.
I thought about that but it would take quite a bit of work. Disabling the faux faces is a one line if statement (which I've already tried out).
Tav
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Tavmjong Bah <tavmjong@...8...> wrote:
Taking a close look at the faux bold faces... the quality is really pretty poor. I can also imagine that there could be licensing issues for non-free fonts. What designer wants to see their work perverted?
The only reason I need for you to ditch it is that it will make your life easier and make us have less surprises.
Cheers, Josh
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine < alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Josh Andler wrote:
Synthesized font faces... Yes, there is value IMHO.
Can you hear me screaming at you from miles away, or should I try harder? :)
Hahaha... I'm not saying I'm in favor of it from a designer perspective. I'm in favor of users not complaining because they can make it bold in Word. I didn't miss not being able to do faux things automatically in AI, so personally I have no investment in it in Inkscape. It's not hard to skew things or use an offset.
Except my suggestion wasn't about using this kind of approach for faux
oblique/bold. It was about using it for large font families like http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/minion/.
Good to know. But if I recall correctly, the original discussion was about doing faux stuff because I can swear italics was part of that discussion too. I could totally be misremembering though.
As for the whole faux faces thing, first of all I'd rather see some proof that the quality of autogenerated "missing" faces is good enough. I know that Behdad means well, but I can't recall a single typeface that wouldn't need tweaking after applying weight/skew adjustment in FontForge.
It's too easy to gain a reputation of a toy application.
I don't disagree. But let's be honest... we are considered a toy application by a lot of designers for a number of good reasons already. While many things can be worked around, a designer shouldn't be forced to jump through hoops to get something print ready.
Cheers, Josh
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 12:57 AM, Josh Andler wrote:
Hahaha... I'm not saying I'm in favor of it from a designer perspective. I'm in favor of users not complaining because they can make it bold in Word.
Personally, I don't think that we should encourage bad workflows. If we let abominations grow, they will eventually come to bite us in the arse.
Except my suggestion wasn't about using this kind of approach for faux oblique/bold. It was about using it for large font families like http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/minion/.
Good to know. But if I recall correctly, the original discussion was about doing faux stuff because I can swear italics was part of that discussion too. I could totally be misremembering though.
So could I :)
It's too easy to gain a reputation of a toy application.
I don't disagree. But let's be honest... we are considered a toy application by a lot of designers for a number of good reasons already.
That doesn't sound like a great reason to commit another crime to me :)
While many things can be worked around, a designer shouldn't be forced to jump through hoops to get something print ready.
Is faux bold/oblique actually print ready? :)
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote:
While many things can be worked around, a designer shouldn't be forced to jump through hoops to get something print ready.
Is faux bold/oblique actually print ready? :)
I convert text to paths before going to print 99% of the time, so kind of a moot point.
I personally dislike faux bold/italic. If it must be done, offset/stroke and skew are easy enough workarounds.
0.02c
Chris
On 03/04/2013 11:39 PM, Chris Mohler wrote:
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote:
While many things can be worked around, a designer shouldn't be forced to jump through hoops to get something print ready.
Is faux bold/oblique actually print ready? :)
I convert text to paths before going to print 99% of the time, so kind of a moot point.
I personally dislike faux bold/italic. If it must be done, offset/stroke and skew are easy enough workarounds.
0.02c
Chris
I agree to everything said here. Please disable workarounds for non-existing problems. :)
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:39 AM, Chris Mohler wrote:
I convert text to paths before going to print 99% of the time, so kind of a moot point.
Fair enough.
I personally dislike faux bold/italic. If it must be done, offset/stroke and skew are easy enough workarounds.
Easy -- yes. Good -- :D
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote:
I personally dislike faux bold/italic. If it must be done, offset/stroke and skew are easy enough workarounds.
Easy -- yes. Good -- :D
Err, yes. My *preferred* workaround is to select another typeface (or family) that works better ;)
But every once in a while, it's just easier to lay on a bit of stroke.
Chris
As a designer (and I think every designer out there will agree, specially type designers) I'm against those faux styles. They're never good, and they can lead the unaware designer to think that certain typeface has a bold or italic variant. If we want free software to become a viable option for professionals and serious users, we have to avoid this kind of things. They make our program look cheap, amateurish.
I'd be happier to see a specialized tool to create offsets, like the existing one, but optimized for type, so we can easily create different weights keeping the features of the typeface (of course, it's probably impossible to create a bulletproof tool for that and some manual tweaking is needed, but as a starting point it would be very useful).
And that would be only for weights and to avoid current workarounds like using offset or adding outlines to make type bolder. Faux italics shouldn't exist at all. Slanting a font is a crime, italics are never the regular glyphs slanted, it's a completely different set of characters, designed from scratch.
Gez
On 2013-03-06 01:17 , Guillermo Espertino (Gez) wrote:
As a designer (and I think every designer out there will agree, specially type designers) I'm against those faux styles. They're never good, and they can lead the unaware designer to think that certain typeface has a bold or italic variant. ... Faux italics shouldn't exist at all. Slanting a font is a crime, italics are never the regular glyphs slanted, it's a completely different set of characters, designed from scratch.
Gez
... and the rest of Gez' post... Gez said it right, in my opinion.
And not only that faux italic shouldn't exist at al. faux small caps, faux variation in thickness, faux oldstyle numerals... faux leather, too ;) Rudimentary typographic variations (regular, bold, italic, bolditalic) are but slightly misleading atavisms of early computer type implementations. I don't know the history well enough, but I imagine that the technical (in)capabilities of that age and typographic ineptitude of digital forefathers had to do something with it. For example, dot matrix printers did faux thingy magnificently. With dot fonts. Those faux bold letters looked so natural! :)
(un)fortunately, those days are gone and we can (or should?) accept and enjoy again the values of well made typography. One of the first steps in teaching the students typography these days is to covertly and gently (or not) undo the dogma that every typeface comes in as a holy tetrad of regular, italic, bold, bolditalic. Not all fonts have to conform to this.
As it was said already in this thread, when that artsy/trendy/trashy faux-whatever type form is needed for effect, the existing tools are more than fitting.
alex
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 9:54 PM, Aleksandar Kovač <alex.open.design@...400...> wrote:
As it was said already in this thread, when that artsy/trendy/trashy faux-whatever type form is needed for effect, the existing tools are more than fitting.
It already got removed in trunk today. Bye bye faux. :)
Cheers, Josh
On Thu, 2013-03-07 at 22:11 -0800, Josh Andler wrote:
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 9:54 PM, Aleksandar Kovač <alex.open.design@...400...> wrote:
As it was said already in this thread, when that artsy/trendy/trashy faux-whatever type form is needed for effect, the existing tools are more than fitting.
It already got removed in trunk today. Bye bye faux. :)
Yes, they are gone. I've blogged about their removal:
http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/?p=822
Tav
Thank you for the excellent blog post Tav! It is a valuable piece, I think. (Would be nice to have it at the Inkscape's wiki, too.)
--- Aleksandar Kovač Kyoto Institute of Technology
On 2013/03/08, at 19:41, Tavmjong Bah <tavmjong@...8...> wrote:
On Thu, 2013-03-07 at 22:11 -0800, Josh Andler wrote:
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 9:54 PM, Aleksandar Kovač <alex.open.design@...400...> wrote:
As it was said already in this thread, when that artsy/trendy/trashy faux-whatever type form is needed for effect, the existing tools are more than fitting.
It already got removed in trunk today. Bye bye faux. :)
Yes, they are gone. I've blogged about their removal:
http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/?p=822
Tav
On Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:39:18 -0800, Josh Andler wrote:
There was a discussion a long time ago about our use of synthesized font faces and it went into territory that I still think no other graphics app has gone into yet (that may have changed over the years).
Adobe was on this road once with special fonts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts
HTH, Helge
participants (10)
-
Aleksandar Kovac -
Aleksandar Kovač -
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Chris Mohler -
Guillermo Espertino (Gez) -
Helge Hielscher -
Josh Andler -
Tavmjong Bah -
vaifrax -
Vladimir Savic