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.
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.
Hey,
I've already looked at the code dealing with kerning in various parts of Inkscape and made up some draft ideas on how to bring this to the UI (not in terms of how it looks good in a Gtk+ UI but I mean in the GUI *code*). Like bulia said I will do this as part of the work under the contract with LinuxFund.org's, I just want the formalities there to be sorted out first :)
On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 2:18 AM, bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> wrote:
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.
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org
On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 3:04 AM, William Klingelsmith wrote:
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.
Thank you for doing that :)
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 personally believe that managing fonts is a job already perfectly done by Fontmatrix :) Coincidentally text tool still requires a lot of attention and some work is not going to be done by Milosz, if I understand it correctly.
Here is a group of text related bug reports:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bugs?field.tag=text
Of them I would highlight:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/170324 https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/171141
Separating face from family in the tool options toolbar alone would solve a number of issues.
Alexandre
participants (4)
-
Alexandre Prokoudine -
bulia byak -
Milosz Derezynski -
William Klingelsmith