Text-Handling in GIMP

Vision

Text handling in GIMP

• Text in GIMP is always part of the composition - (unless it is an annotation)
• There is no such thing as paging in gimp
• Text in gimp has form and symbolic meaning, but meta levels of information in text are not supported

Users get:

• Complete control over typography and the layout of text on the canvas
• unicode supported localisation of text tools
• text editing for ever
• super-fast workflow, when they are experienced

Functionality

Internationalization

• full support of all Unicode content
• support for all OpenType features
• multiple writing systems in the same text-box
• right to left and top-down textflow

Corrections

• the text content is always accessible and editable
• all applied effects are kept

Quick plain text

• the full-functionality text-tool is not obligatory
• simple annotations are supported
• can be inserted in an easy way

Effects

• stroke text
• fill text
• all effects and filter can be applied on the text itself (see "Corrections")

Layout

• full control to the user on every level
• all this is done in the context of the overall work:
  • the canvas
  • the applied effects

Positioning

• freely positionable on the canvas
• text boxes of any shape
• (rectangular) box fixed or dynamic
• text overflow from box to box
• text along path
• transformation tools
• combinations of above functions
• ?grid (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_%28page_layout%29 )

Typography

• fine grained-control
• presets can be saved
• manual access (M) to open type (OT) features: Glyph palette

Character level

• Font family
• Font variant
• size
• Color
• Hinting
• Kerning (M+OT)
• faux bold+italics
• underline
• through-line
• baseline shift
• language

+ OpenType features

• ?glyph scaling (vertical and horizontal)

line and paragraph level

• leading (Line Spacing)
• tracking
• Indent
• justification
• inter-paragraph spacing
• text-flow