Hi, I've made a little research about typography in the last week becauseeverybody on the list was talking about this "this time we get itright"-thing. And here are the problems I see and some suggestions to it: First of all (although perhaps the least important), it would be good tohave a well-designed font selection dialog, that allows a quickselection of a font even when you have a lot of fonts installed andyou're perhaps searching for a specific font face and you don't know thename of a specific font that fulfills your needs.A little googling then pointed me to that site:http://www.unifont.org/fontdialog/I clearly see the problem that a well-designed font-dialog is a taskthat should be implemented in the toolkit, so gtk+ in our case, but Ithink it's important to point out that this is a thing which is reallyannoying when using the gimp (well, at least it is annoying me for along time, because one doesn't really have to look for artistic fontswhen simply writing a letter or something with a word processor). About justification and writing direction: I've used some Asian fonts inone of my last gimp works... and then I couldn't believe that this seemsto be a problem, too. I'm still thinking it is my fault not finding theoptions for it :) (perhaps it's some localization specific setting orsomething) ... Where can I set the writing direction (from right toleft, left to right, top to bottom, bottom to top, etc.)?? and whatwould justification like left justified mean for a box that has awriting direction from top to bottom? Ok, but now more to the Western font problems. The so-called "tracking"is implemented with the letter-spacing mechanism. There is, however, nooption to disable/enable the so-called "kerning" of a font. It's notalways desirable to have kerning enabled, and at the moment I helpedmyself in just using tracking for this, although it's definitely NOTgiving the exact result I wanted to have. So another option forenabling/disabling kerning of a font would be nice, too. And I don'tknow, perhaps FreeType has an auto-kerning mechanism, too, like theyhave for hinting (the auto-hinter). Another really nice feature would be, if one could activate ligaturesubstitutions! So if I type the German words "finden" or "fliegen" theligatures "fi" and "fl" would automatically be substituted with theappropriate unicode sign for these ligatures. Another good example isalways the "ff" ligature... like in the German word "hoffen". I don'tlike the idea that ligatures are always substituted because sometimesthe ligature signs don't have hinting information (and then one would beforced to use FreeType's autohinter) and furthermore it is not alwaysdesirable to get the ligatures substituted (because you don't like themor what ever). Another thing. If one changes the font size, it would be desirable tohave the immediate informations about the "cap height", the "ascent",the "descent", the "x-height" and the "accent height" for the fontaccording to the font size. These are no informations which can bechanged (of course), but sometimes I'd like to have the possibility tosee the effective x-height for a font with 10 pixels, because perhaps Iwant to have an x-height of 6 pixels and I don't really care about thereal font size anyway. For the PDB api, it would be necessary to do some additional functionswhich calculate the extents of the text (with all options possibly to beenabled/disabled which could change the extents), the extents of thewhole text-box (text-layer in fact), and perhaps some functions whichcould calculate positions: starting position, which can be differentfrom the text-box position, and the position at every offset in thetext... for example one could get the position of the second word in"Der Übergang", add to it the "cap height" of the font, and one wouldget the position directly above the "U" and underneath the accent. So far my comments on the current text tool. best regardsMarcus _______________________________________________Gimp-developer mailing listGimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
