If you recall, I proposed "flow into shape" on the toolbar for easier chart items, with border and alignment options, while many of you also want kerning commands in the text toolbar as well.

(oh by the way, I'll have to decline on removing the "vertical layout" button from the toolbar: I'm half-Chinese, so it wouldn't surprise me if some took that removal rather badly ;) )

http://img57.imageshack.us/img57/475/textinterface3uc0.png

(It's still messy for now)

As you can see, even after resizing and removing unnecessary buttons, the resulting toolbar would still be ridiculously long.

So basically, the ideal would be to first implement a way to control what appears in the toolbar. Options include: - ticking boxes or lists in text preferences - a button on the toolbar to add or remove buttons by ticking from a list - right click -> customize then drag and drop (like in Firefox 3) - alternatively, is it out of the question to have buttons appear on 2 rows? (with options to collapse parts)?

So the big question is... which of the above is feasible and/or can be implemented most easily/fastest?

This would be useful for other tools that are starting to have too many options, too.

Once something like that is implemented, more options can be added, such as: - more text style elements (underline, strike-through, subscript, superscript, etc) - I was thinking offsets values for object aligns. - spellcheck options and custom layout options? - presets too

On an unrelated note: text rendering happens to be pretty slow in Inkscape. This is probably due for its conversion into a deformable svg object? But some of us just want to do charts in Inkscape without fancy text effects, or do one of those tutorial picture files you see on Deviantart. When you reach a text file that size though, Inkscape starts to become Really slow.

Is it possible to get a "plain text" option for all that? If I wanted to resize the text, I'd change the font size, not accidentally drag on the text box corners. There could be a toggle button between plain text and dynamic text, just like there's a toggle right now between bezier and spiro.