On 2020-06-20 09:27, Liam R E Quin wrote:
For some time i've been thinking about what a user interface to opentype features could look like.… Inkscape already has some opentype feature support, but i don't think there's a UI for choosing alternate glyphs, and i find it a little hard to use, but maybe that's just me. It's a start, at least. What do you think?
A long time ago, I was a software developer in the Type Department at Adobe Systems, watching the type designers come up with the OpenType font features, and watching the Adobe InDesign and other teams design UIs to take advantage of OpenType features and to render text applying those features. Based on that, I have a few thoughts.
If you are thinking about giving Gimp users the ability to take advantage of the capabilities of OpenType fonts and their features, that's wonderful, but it's also a major UI design challenge. I would suggest starting with user stories. Who wants to use Gimp for this purpose? In what language or script? Trying to accomplish what goal? Based on those stories, you can decide whether the right UI is to turn on features and let the text rendering pick the glyphs, or to give users a big palette of glyphs and let them choose, or some combination of the two.
In general, good results from OpenType requires a cooperative text layout engine that has language- and script-specific rules. Those rules affect how it interprets the feature data in the font. Thus you shouldn't expect, for example, that Gimp can have a language-agnostic UI and text engine which will do a good job of such diverse scripts as Latin and Arabic. You will need to do some language- and script-specific UI and text engine logic.
Inkscape already has some opentype feature support, but i don't think there's a UI for choosing alternate glyphs, and i find it a little hard to use, but maybe that's just me. It's a start, at least.
In looking for examples and inspiration for user interaction design, I would nominate Adobe Indesign as probably the best design for empowering users to get good typography results from OpenType. Adobe invested a lot of effort to get that right. But that design only covers a few scripts, such as Latin and Japanese. It did not, in my time, cover Arabic or Indic scripts equally well (though Adobe might have added that later). Also look at LibreOffice, which has OpenType feature support which I use and like.
Today i came across this Web app, which gives a possible idea for showing alternate glyphs, something GIMP users can't access at all right now. https://alif-type.github.io/rana-kufi/app/ Click on the large Arabic text to see: a list of alternate shapes appears beneath the selection. Sometimes there are many of them.
This app provides a fascinating visual exercise. However, my understanding is that Arabic script is basically calligraphy, only somewhat constrained by mechanistic typesetting. I imagine there is a lot going on with this app beyond choosing from a palette of alternate glyphs. Getting good results requires knowing which glyphs to choose from the palette. Enabling users to get good results with Arabic script in Gimp will require Arabic script expertise.
In sum: typography done right is a major undertaking. It requires more than linking in a capable library and pasting on a simple UI.
Best regards, —Jim DeLaHunt, software engineer, Vancouver, Canada _______________________________________________ gimp-developer-list mailing list List address: gimp-developer-list@xxxxxxxxx List membership: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer-list List archives: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list
