Re: [fontforge-devel] Making Python3 the default

[Skef I. <gi...@sk...>]

I've thought about this a little bit. It points down the road of a text 
or array/dictionary structure "language" for specifying custom dialogs.

If there were already such a thing in wide use, FontForge could grab or 
borrow it. That might be a sensible project, and could be supported into 
the future. However, poking around I didn't find anything like that in 
use. Since it's such an obvious direction that makes me suspect that 
other projects have gone further down that road and then abandoned it.

Anyway, there's another viable approach that would be easier to support 
-- probably pretty straightforward. Using RPyC (or whatever equivalent) 
one could start an external process and communicate back and forth with 
it. It could then use whatever graphics layer it wanted. The FontForge 
side support you'd want to make things clean would be:

 1. An interface for retrieving window dimensions relative to the screen
    (tricky in some cases), and
 2. An interface for a modal "grab" and "ungrab", to temporarily freeze
    the interface on the FontForge side.

Like adding support for GTK, this would let you do almost anything, 
including add non-modal windows if you wanted.

Skef

On 6/4/19 5:06 AM, Abraham Lee wrote:

> Hey, Fred!
>
> On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 4:17 AM Fred Brennan <cop...@ki... 
> <mailto:cop...@ki...>> wrote:
>
>     We talked about getting PyGTK support in https://github.com/fontforge/
>     fontforge/issues/3663
>     <https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/3663>, which might
>     interest you considering your interest in
>     using foreign GUI platforms inside FontForge's python interface.
>
>
> Whatever works, but if energy would be spent better on other things 
> that need to be done first, that’s ok, too. This is a wishlist thing 
> for me.
>
> My particular usage would prefer, at least, to be able to make 
> slightly more populated input popups where I can have text inputs, 
> drop downs, radio buttons, etc., all in a single window. At the 
> moment, using the few popup types available, I have to use anywhere 
> from 2-6 individual input text boxes because the popup only allows for 
> one at a time. It’s not a huge deal, just a convenience thing.
>
> Ideally, being able to have a live connection between the outline 
> editor and a separate input popup, that would allow me to “apply” an 
> affect (similar to the current transform GUI) would be nice, but not 
> critical.
>
> I’m grateful for whatever can be done since I have about 30-50 plugins 
> I regularly use and being able to streamline them would be great, but 
> don’t feel like this needs to be top priority. This change to Python 3 
> is a good one and it finally gives me a solid reason to port my own 
> code to Python 3.
>
> Best,
> Abraham
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> fontforge-devel mailing list
> fon...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel
> http://fontforge.10959.n7.nabble.com/Developer-f3.html