#249 Replace alphabet symbol stamps with a new tool or Magic tool

[William Kendrick]

Managing/maintaining the different alphabetic characters we have as stamps is unwieldy and difficult to maintain/extend. For each letter, we have both uppercase and lowercase, and each in both "filled" and "outline" variations (so for just the English alphabet, that's 26 x 2 x 2 = 104 files!).

Also, there's currently no way for Tux Paint to only offer certain shapes in certain languages. So all users currently see all the English + Spanish + German letters. Besnik asked about adding Albanian, which would add more letters, which would again be visible to all users (not just those using an Albanian locale; and conversely, Albanian users would see an English "W", Spanish "Ñ", etc.).

While I'm tempted to say "remove all letter stampes & let users rely on the 'Text' and 'Label' tools", it occurred to me that we could potentially address this by creating a new Magic plugin which creates a suite of tools (within its own Magic tool group) for each symbole, or a whole new "first-class" tool, that offers letter stamping. Instead of relying on PNG bitmaps (what we have now) or SVGs (which would be preferable), we could use text strings and a font (or fonts) to render the text.

And instead of having to keep multiple identical (or for unknown reasons, NON-identical) descriptive sound effect (.ogg) files for each letter four times -- uppercase filled, lowercase filled, uppercase outlined, lowercase outlined -- we would only need to maintain one each. (Per locale, obviously.)

If a first-class tool, the interface could be specialized for the purpose of plopping single letters onto the canvas, offering size, style, and perhaps font options in the selector (right side), while using a pop-up or something similar to the on-screen keyboard used by Text and Label tools, to select characters.

Each locale would have a string, or set of strings, that defines which characters to offer, e.g.;

• English: A;B;C;D;E;F;G;H;I;J;K;L;M;N;O;P;Q;R;S;T;U;V;W;X;Y;Z
• Albanian: A;B;C;Ç;D;E;Ë;F;G;Gj;H;I;J;K;L;Ll;M;N;Nj;O;P;Q;R;Rr;S;Sh;T;Th;U;V;Xh;X;Y;Z;Zh
  ...etc.

[William Kendrick]

Total size of all .ogg files in stamps/symbols/alphabets/ is 19MB. Collecting .ogg files for each individual letter (in each spoken language) comes out to just under half that (8.4MB).

The total size of all .png files in there is 477KB; however, they are also compressed. They are generally in the 100x100 range, so stored at 32-bits per pixel (RGBA) internally, about 40KB each. With ~160 of them, that could potentially be about 6.5MB of RAM being used.

[Pere Pujal i Carabantes]

I'd prioritize the specific language letters but not hide the other languages letters, just append them at the end.
There are too many situations were one has to write words that are in another language.