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
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