There's an interesting discussion going on in the type-design community at the moment that I think a number of FOSS projects might be interested in.
The issue is how applications expose (or fail to expose...) the font features available in a selected font to the user. This is "features" in the sense of optional functionality built into the font itself: small-capitals, variant forms of glyphs (individually, like swash caps, or in sets), lining or tabular numeral options, extra ligatures, that sort of thing. All those are things that the font designer can create pretty easily, technically speaking -- good software support across the board, and OpenType files have standardized the formats that the features are encoded in -- but, in order to be of real use, it's the design applications that have to recognize them and provide a usable interface to. For instance, if somebody is creating an ad or sign (in, e.g., GIMP or Scribus); ideally they could (a) find out easily that their selected font has some optional features that might apply to their work, (b) try out the features without much trouble. They may also (c) have some feature in mind and want to figure out which, if any, of their installed fonts support it. Thing is, proprietary design apps do a terrible job on all counts of this. So much so that at this past month's annual ATypI conference there was a spontaneous speech from the audience on the subject during one of the panel discussions, and they eventually started an online petition to provoke Adobe to do something about it in Adobe Creative Suite: http://ilovetypography.com/2014/10/22/better-ui-for-better-typography-adobe-petition/ I don't know what the odds are that Adobe is actually going to respond to it, but there doesn't seem to be much movement. ANYWAY, to get to the point: free-software design apps don't really do a better job. So, (a) there's an opportunity here to do something useful, but just as importantly, (b) there's a knowledgeable community discussing what the right interface to this sort of feature should be, so that's worth listening to. There's a blog post that shows what recent Adobe UI designs are like: http://ilovetypography.com/2014/10/25/why-a-better-opentype-user-interface-matters/ -- spoiler: it's a big hierarchy of nested context menus. There have also been some experiments in mocking up what folks think would be a more useful approach: - https://klim.co.nz/blog/towards-an-ideal-opentype-user-interface/ - https://medium.com/@CommandZed/thoughts-on-an-improved-opentype-ui-c6748f2eef3a So I'm curious (1) if anyone else is interested in this topic, (2) if anyone has worked on it already, and (3) if anyone is interested in pursuing it further. It does seem like something it would be worth collaborating on a common approach to (generally speaking, I mean), hence my bringing it up here. Implementation difficulty I'm not going to hesitate a guess at; that probably varies a lot. But even if not every application project is interested is working on it anytime soon, thinking about it is probably good, and you never know -- it could make for a project someone else would like to tackle down the road. Thanks, Nate _______________________________________________ CREATE mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create
