[Fontforge-devel] Editing glyph classes: GUI changes

[Alexey K. <ana...@ya...>]

Hi,

I have recently updated from CVS after nearly 1.5 months delay,
and, unfortunately, I should say some recent GUI changes look very
discouraging for me.

First of all, I hate those Unicode characters in parentheses which now
accompany glyph names in glyph lists. Yes, I understand glyph names
often aren't very intuitive so some tips/hints might be helpful here.
Nevertheless placing those tips directly into editable fields looks
a completely wrong idea for me, as it might be very misleading for
a user to put a cursor into an input field and find there some
characters (s)he has never typed. Moreover, the current approach
sometimes leads to undesired spacing effects (see the first attached
screenshot: contextual1.png). So if it is difficult to provide a better
alternative to characters in parentheses (such as tooltips, displaying
glyph images from the current font, like those available when editing
simple glyph substitutions), then at least there should be an option
(probably on by default) allowing to disable the current behavior.

Second, I find the new layout of the "kerning by classes" dialog very
inconvenient. I used to always use that dialog maximized, so that I
could see a maximum possible number of cells at once. Now even in
maximized mode half screen is no longer accessible for me. On the other
hand, I don't find it really useful to have kerning display always
visible. The reason is that the dialog in question is extremely useful
to logically construct sets of kerning classes, but it is not really
suitable for visually adjusting individual kerning values anyway,
because one just can't properly kern two characters without having a
context.

I also don't like the new GUI for editing glyph classes, based on
matrix edit controls. One problem with those controls is that under
certain conditions (many match rules in the "edit contextual
substitution" dialog) they are displayed so downsized that it is
impossible to do anything with them without resizing the dialog (see
the second screenshot, contextual2.png).

Well, that's probably easy to fix, but the second problem is
much more important. Previously it was possible to use the same dialog
either to input individual glyph names manually, or to set them from the
fontview selection. Now there are two separate dialogs. The first one,
displayed when I click at a long line in a matrix edit control, allows
text input, but nothing more, and so its utility is limited. There is
also a bastardized fontview, which can be accessed via a special button
displayed at the end of a matrix cell. Note that

1) the button has no label, so that a novice user might even not
notice it; 

1) if at least one class in the matrix contains a long enough list of
glyphs (and most classes do), then the button would be initially
invisible: I have to scroll the control contents to right in order to
access it;

3) the window itself is much less convenient for selecting glyphs than
normal fontview due to the small size of glyph cells, which cannot be
changed (the menu items responsibe for window size and geometry aren't
disabled, but selecting them leads to unexpected effects).

As you can see, with the new controls I need much more mouse clicks to
do the same job, especially if I used to combine direct typing and
importing the names of selected glyphs. It also seems just illogical to
have two very similar windows were one was sufficient. 

-- 
Regards,
Alexey Kryukov <anagnost at yandex dot ru>

Moscow State University
Historical Faculty