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Text tool: Toolbox vs. on-canvas options

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Text tool: Toolbox vs. on-canvas options Richard 16 May 15:55
Richard
2014-05-16 15:55:24 UTC (almost 10 years ago)

Text tool: Toolbox vs. on-canvas options

As much as I love the new on-canvas text editing in GIMP 2.8, I do run into some creative disputes with the on-canvas text editor from time to time....

My main issue is that the on-canvas options are used to provide local style overrides (e.g. emphasizing a word here or there) and have no connection to the default settings for the text object as a whole. Local style overrides are good and all, but there are some scenarios where you might think (even expect) the on-canvas options to change the default for the text object as a whole, and they don't. And not understanding that these are separate settings leads to problems down the road, such as:

1 - If there is no selection inside the text, the on-canvas controls have no immediate (visible) effect; they appear to "not work" because there is no selection to affect. GIMP makes no attempts to divine whether you intended to change the default style or specify a new one to start typing with (which is a rightly thorny issue by itself). As an alternative idea - you know how if you double-click it selects the current word, and if you triple-click it selects all text in the object? How about adding an intermediary step where it selects all nearby words that share the same style? E.g. 2 clicks - current word; 3 clicks - current style; 4 clicks - all text

(Another alternative would be, in the Layers dialog, display a text object like a layer group instead of a single layer, similar to the display of an XML tree. But I'm sure the technical implementation would be horribly complex :[ )

2 - Inversely, select all text in the object and then make some adjustment to it (font face/size/color). This has the same (visible) effect as changing the default style, but again, technically you are specifying a local style that just happens to cover the length of the entire text object and GIMP is making no attempts to discern whether that was actually your intent. The immediate result is - if the cursor is placed at the start of the text object then any insertions are typed using the default style, while if the cursor is placed at the end, any insertions are typed using the local style. I don't really see any ideal alternative behavior here (word processors in general tend to do the same thing) outside of just "don't do that".

3 - Related to #2: When creating a text object, click once to get started, but before the initial typing, make some adjustments via on-canvas controls (again, font face/size/color). Again, whether you realize/expect it or not you are typing using a local style override that is not affected by the default options in the toolbox.

4 - If you use the on-canvas controls to specify a setting that happens to match as the default (toolbox) options, it is actually -not- the same setting but invisibly different. E.g. type "Lorem Ipsum" at 24px size; then change the word "Lorem" to 28; then change it back to 24 (do not Undo this; change it back manually). Now adjust the default font size in the toolbox; the word "Lorem" does not change in size because it's not actually using the default size, it's using a local size that just -coincidentally matches- the default size. (A similar thing applies with font face and color.) Here, the on-canvas Font Face and Font Size boxes could benefit from an additional entry (labelled "default" or something) to identify when a given section of text is using the default face/size or not; there's no easy way to tell at the moment.

5 - Speaking of font sizes, an option/setting/preference to scale local font sizes (on-canvas options) relative to changes made in the default size (toolbox options) would be stellar. Say I'm using 'small caps' to emphasize words or phrases in one of my text objects -- which I do by typing the emphasized words in ALLCAPS and then shrinking their text size by a notch (e.g. 20 px default style -> 16 px local style). Some time later I want to scale my text object from a default of 20px to 40px and I do -- but my smallcaps words are stuck at 16px and I have to resize them manually. If I was choosing a different form of emphasis (bold/italic) this would not be a problem, but as it stands....

6 - And, out of two years' occasional GIMP 2.8 usage I did not even once realize there was a button in the on-canvas box labelled "clear style of selected text". (A.k.a. the 'revert' button.) How come I never noticed it before? . . . I'm thinking maybe because its icon is a -paintbrush-. (Y'know, an interior decorating paintbrush like you'd buy at a home improvement store instead of an art store.) See, paintbrushes are tools that 'do' stuff, not 'undo' stuff. Shouldn't the icon be an eraser instead? Or even that arrow-circling-about-back-to-itself like we have on every other reset-to-default button in every toolbox?

I also have some gripes about the placement of the 'clear style' button (now that I'm aware of it) in the on-canvas toolbox, but that's eclipsed by it having a counter-intuitive icon.

-- Stratadrake strata_ranger@hotmail.com
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Numbers may not lie, but neither do they tell the whole truth.