Re: [Gimp-gui] PLEASE improve font organization

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, 2022-06-30 at 01:32 +0200, Jehan wrote:
> [
> I...]

>  understand. Though I think that the point is also that these are
> considered fonts of their own. I.e. using your example, sure Arial 
> Italic and Arial are related, but Arial Italic is more than just
> Arial 
> glyphs made italic. It is its own font (in its specific style).
>
> Now we would actually need more inputs from the people more 
> knowledgeable about fonts and its ecosystem. Liam, if you read this, 
> maybe you have an opinion to share?

There have been commercial products to improve font menus by grouping
related fonts together - e.g. Font Reunion.

It's hard in general because a lot of fonts have names that don't make
joining them automatically very easy.

However, we could do better than what is done today, for sure.

I tried also experimenting by writing a program that made a tags.xml
file for me, e.g. marking which fonts had OpenType features, so i could
find them. Unfortunately the resulting 50MByte set of tags really slows
down the text tool a lot. And it's hard to use.

I also started work in moving to a GEGL-based text tool (GEGL is the
underlying library) but i ran into some blocking issues, both in GEGL
and in the text library Pango.  Pango recently fixed one of the issues
i think, so that we'll actually be able to use all the fonts in the
list (!), and probably the maintainers would fix the other
(letterspacing support in the markup interface), and Pippin has made
good progress recently on the gegl issue (paths in the pipeline).

But i've been ill, and may or may not be getting better, so i'll help
as much as i can but someone else needs to do the coding, and we need
to work together on the design.

We need to add decent OpenType feature support too.

Agree about marking System fonts, fontmatrix does that too, except
there's no clear definition of what is a system font really, and
fontmatrix guesses really badly! We can easily do better there.

I'd also like to see fonts that are only active when a particular
"project" is active, but that's a long-term thing, as we don't really
have a definition of a project right now :)

liam (ankh / demib0y / barefootliam)

-- 
Liam Quin - https://www.fromoldbooks.org/
https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Full-time "slave" in voluntary servitude