GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 170299
improve use of symbol fonts with the text tool
Last modified: 2008-01-15 12:49:56 UTC
Please describe the problem: I am trying to access upper ASCII characters and insert them into a text layer in the GIMP. However, the GIMP is translating my pasted ASCII characters into unicode or Windows character codes, or something (I know a little about the differences) Steps to reproduce: 1. Start a new text entry tool 2. Select Wingdings 2 font (Windows XP) 3. Type ABC - you will see pointing hands 4. Fire up another text editor, for example notepad 5. Select the Wingdings 2 font in your editor 6. Enter ASCII key codes using Alt+x where x is on the numeric keypad: 0251 0252 0253 0254 7. These will appear as a cross, tick, & boxed cross, and boxed tick 8. Select the four glyphs and copy them (Ctrl+C) 9. Return to GIMP and paste (Ctrl+V) into the GIMP text editor pallete. Actual results: The characters pasted into the GIMP text editor at step 9 come out as u grave, u umlaut, y accent and a greek character, and are not in the Windings font. The characters appear as a bullseye, small square dot, y accent and the same greek character in the image proper. If you change the GIMP font of the text box, these last 4 glyphs will not change, and (depending on chosen font) can be seen as a different typeface to the one you've selected, as with Windings. Expected results: I would expect the correct Wingdings symbols to appear, namely the four ticks and crosses, unboxed and boxed Does this happen every time? Yes Other information: This could well be a problem with FreeType 2 I would expect to be able to enter character codes directly into the GIMP Text Editing tool box - in the manner of step 6. Currently, the box ignores anything typed with Alt held down
Character codes don't make any sense here because the text tool works all in Unicode. Characters are never accessed by their index in the font file, they are always accessed by their Unicode representation. Using a tool such as gunicharmap allows you to look up Unicode values for characters in symbol fonts. The fact that the text editor you are using uses a different (and rather broken) character encoding than GIMP doesn't make this a GIMP bug. We could try to add functionality to the GIMP text editor that makes it easier to work with symbol fonts. I am changing the summary and severity accordingly.
Entering Alt+xxxx in windows *is* entering a unicode value, and it also works in any GTK+ program, just use <ctrl>+<shift>+xxxx This bug is actually about using the selected font in the editor window, so you can see the symbols you are typing. Maybe a toggle in the text editor "[ ] Use selected font" would be appropriate? We certainly don't want to do this by default.
That would probably do the trick and should be easy to implement. Setting target milestone to 2.4.
Fixed in CVS: 2005-06-11 Michael Natterer <mitch@gimp.org> Allow to use the selected font in the text editor (bug #170299): * app/widgets/gimptexteditor.[ch]: added a "Use selected font" toggle and an API to set/get the selected font name. * app/tools/gimptextoptions.c: update the editor's font when the text option's font changes. Renamed text editor callbacks to gimp_text_options_editor_foo().