GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 120268
support letter spacing in the text tool
Last modified: 2006-02-05 16:04:38 UTC
Letter spacing (CSS terminology)/ Tracking (Adobe terminology) support in the text tool is missing. Although I miss it a lot, it's not a regression since only gimp-freetype used to have that.
Marking milestone:2.2
I started to work on this some time ago. It can be implemented relatively easy by iterating over glyph clusters and inserting placeholder characters together with shape attributes. This used to be buggy in PangoFt2 but as a result of my hacking, it's functional now. This approach would even allow to control the letter spacing individually. We'd only have to find a way to store this setting reasonably and the GUI to control this setting might be tricky.
For kerning (spacing between individual glyphs) Adobe Illustrator uses Alt+left, Alt+right cursor key shortcuts. The spacing where the cursor is placed is affected.
For the record (people searching in the bug database), it can be called kerning too, depending in how the text is changed (tracking is global, kerning is about pairs, to make some cases look better). And controlling baseline (vertical offset) could be nice too.
Created attachment 20936 [details] [review] Text that implements letter-spacing in an unacceptably hackish way
I've attached a patch that tries to implement this feature using the existing Pango API. It works reasonably well for european scripts but breaks with arabic and probably other scripts. My conclusion is that it is infeasible to attempt to implement this outside of Pango. I will look into adding this feature to Pango then. If the patch works for you, feel free to use it. I've just added the "letter-spacing" property to CVS so if you use the patch, the XCF files won't break an unpatched GIMP-1.3 (> 1.3.21).
Marking this bug dependant on the Pango enhancement request I just filed as bug #125483.
*** Bug 53737 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 118418 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment on attachment 20936 [details] [review] Text that implements letter-spacing in an unacceptably hackish way setting "needs work" on this patch. Just to keep it out of the unreviewed patch list.
I don't think we want to let GIMP 2.2 depend on Pango 1.6. We should however implement this as soon as 2.2 is released. Bumping to the Future milestone.
2005-03-02 Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> * app/text/gimptextlayout.[ch] * app/tools/gimptextoptions.h: allow to adjust letter-spacing.
*** Bug 303057 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 310738 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 329543 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
so has this been done yet? does GIMP 2.2.10 support this?
> so has this been done yet? Yes. > does GIMP 2.2.10 support this? No, but Gimp 2.4.x will support it.
I saw bug 329543 and I have to detail that, for the moment, the support is for global spacing, but not per character spacing (kerning) as Inkscape does. So if that is what you (Matthew Prasiniv) really mean then better open a bug and be pretty clear about it. If you want to check yourself the current feature, try to get a CVS snapshot (2.3.x) and test yourself.
I saw bug 329543 and I have to detail that, for the moment, the support is for global spacing, but not per character spacing (kerning) as Inkscape does. So if that is what you (Matthew Prasinov) really mean then better open a bug and be pretty clear about it. If you want to check yourself the current feature, try to get a CVS snapshot (2.3.x) and test yourself.