GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 331952
Support manual adjustment of letter spacing
Last modified: 2010-08-22 19:07:45 UTC
There seems to be no way to manually adjust the kerning of text glyphs. It would be nice if users could go over the text they write and adjust the separation from one glyph to the next, in a by pair basis, not just globally. This would allow "fixing" bad fonts but also matching the text to the background (fix optical illusions) or even do creative layouts without requiring to split the text into multiple separate texts.
I thought we had this feature request already. Yes, that would be nice to have. Do you have some suggestions on how the user interface for this could look like? It is however not the kerning that you want to adjust here. What you actually want is to change the amount of spacing between graphemes of the text. Changing the summary accordingly.
About interface, the typical way in other apps seems to be some key combos to increase or decrease the distance between the two <whatever name for items> that the cursor separates. Having a numeric input for it could be interesting, I guess, based in values obtained by user as he does some visual adjustments, noting down the values and then being able to reuse in scripts... this would assume the text tool would support some way to set <whatever name for the space change> when called from scripts or feed with some special "string". About the names, well, I was using terms like in: http://css.nu/articles/typograph1-en.html http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/text/kerning.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning They use kerning and glyphs, with spacing as generic word, and grapheme has to be found in linked articles.
I think this is one of the key features that gimp is lacking at the moment. Though kerning is supported for a whole text, it is not for separate letters. I would like to stress how important this is for typographic design. There is not a single design in which I use text where I don't use kerning. That goes for EVERY designer I know. It is also said that the use of this is because of 'bad' fonts. I disagree. That has absolutely nothing to do with it. It is about the control the designer has over the image, and as soon as text is involved, individual glyphs should be manipulatable. This IS the photoshop-killer feature that Gimp needs...
We have text styles implemented currently in the latest git, and manual kerning is supported. Although the functionality may have some bugs, that's a different issue. I recommend closing this bug/enhancement...