5.1 Wish List

[Yuri Yarmola (FontLab)]

We have plans for total color customization of all "work windows" in Fog, but I don't know if it will go into 5.1 or next release.

[Yuri Yarmola (FontLab)]

I'm trying to find out why a 2343-glyph font generates a 2341-glyph .otf,

It seems to be a result of another problem of fog5: "one unicode per glyph" limitation which comes from old fog4 limitations. To get around this we have to clone glyphs that are referenced from more than one Unicode index (using composites) and assign other names to these clones. Unfortunately on export, these clones are not combined into single multiple-Unicode glyph, so there will be difference.

This is planned for a fix in 5.1 or future release.

[ingrimayne]

Fix the bugs, obviously.

I have always wished for a comment page on which the designer could store notes about the fonts. I believe FontLab has something like this. When you come back to a font after ten years, you no longer remember many of the rationales of why you did things the way you did. In a computer program a programmer can insert comments to help him out if he has to revisit the code after a long delay. It would be nice to have something equivalent in Fontographer.

I would also like an option to allow horizontal guide lines to be shown the metrics window. This would make it easier to catch mistakes in vertical alignments.

Also, I like the way you can view the font window in FontLab at various sizes. Again, this helps catch mistakes, and it would be nice to be able to view the font window at a larger size.
 
I was going also to suggest that it would be nice to be able to copy and paste glyphs between Fontographer and FontLab. I tried it and found that you can paste from FontLab to Fontographer but not the other way. That may be a useful feature that I will be able to use.

[Evertype]

Also, I like the way you can view the font window in FontLab at various sizes. Again, this helps catch mistakes, and it would be nice to be able to view the font window at a larger size.

In what way can't you do this in Fog?

[Evertype]

Fog 5.0 has Window > View Windows by > Font name/File name/Both which is fine. But I would like to see the three buttons added to Preferences > Windows so that the user can choose the default he or she prefers.

In my case, I want Both to be the default.

This has now been implemented! :-) It's in Fontographer > Preferences > Windows

[ingrimayne]

"In what way can't you do this in Fog?"

In the main font view window, there is no way to change the size of the individual cells. They are much better drawn than they were in previous versions of Fontographer, but they are fixed. In Fontlab there is a pull down menu on the bottom of the main font view window that lets you view the cells from as small as 16 by 16 (pretty useless for me) up to 128 by 128. It would be nice to be able to get 128 by 128 cells in Fontographer.

[ingrimayne]

Currently it seems that Fontographer supports the Unicode 5 standard and not the additions that were made in Unicode 6. It would be useful to have it upgraded to Unicode 6 support.

[LTD]

The default window work area of 585px x 309px is just too small. I can see how that would have filled the 9" screen on a Mac SE but with 27" displays these days it really is time to fix this.

A preference setting like:
Work area size: Small (current size), Medium (half screen), Maximum (full screen).

[cool_hand]

Is there a technical reason why it would not be possible to import a greyscale images into the Template layer?

[David Bergsland]

[Line by line response] author=dave_at_efi link=topic=7614.msg25788#msg25788 date=1276629487
OK, here's my Wish List for 5.1, most important first:
If the request isn't relevant to me I deleted it.
1. 

2. 
3. 

4.  Add "Action buttons" to the glyph window header that, if clicked, do the following to the selected element/object/path:
   A.  Rotate clockwise 90 degrees
   B.  Rotate counterclockwise 90 degrees
   C.  Flip horizontal
   D.  Flip vertical
   E.   Open the Move dialog box
   F.   Open the Rotate dialog box
   G.  Open the Oval dialog box
This would be very nice!

5. 

6.  Assign the Hyphen key to select the Rotate tool.
Excellent! IF you also allow the minus key in the numerical keypad to work. The number keys work so well for left-handed people that all tool selectors need to use a key on the numerical keypad as well as one on the qwerty pad for right-handed people.

7. 

8. 

9.  Make Undo work at the whole-font level.  If I Copy/Paste a whole glyph into the wrong location, I must open up the glyph window to perform the Undo, rather than just select the error at the whole-font level and Undo.
Agreed. If I am working on the font window level, I need to be able to undo at the font window level.

10. 

11. 

12. 

13.  In Preferences, Editing Behavior, allow an option:  All points in a Pasted object are automatically selected, previously selected points are deselected.
I guess this has been done already, right? That's the way it works on my machine.

14.  Expand Preferences to enable/disable any keyboard shortcuts.
More than that, keyboard shortcut control. EVery application I use has shortcut control. It is assumed and very irritating when it is not there. Like I would add shortcuts for the rest of the tools and especially one for Decompose.

15. 
16. 
17. 

18.  "Paste Special" will Paste the selected elements from one glyph into all selected glyphs, without changing anything else within those glyphs. [Extremely useful when pasting Rules/Guidelines into all characters.]
Also extremely useful when I am pasting my "pieces" component into A-Z or a-z.

19. 

20.  Eliminate the "Regular" in the automatically generated Font Info/Names section
Or a checkbox to make it optional.

21. 
22.  When a glyph has been changed and the .fog not saved, make the glyph color bar much brighter to indicate the change.
Maybe color controls would help? The present indicating color works for me.

[David Bergsland]

Dave,

> 20.  Eliminate the "Regular" in the automatically generated Font Info/Names section

Can you elaborate on this? Why would you want that?

As for your other suggestions, some of them are indeed already planned, while others will need careful consideration.

Normally a regular font does not have a style name. For example, Brinar, Brinar Italic, Brinar Black, Brinar Black Italic
The only silly thing about that is when book is listed as regular for a font that has Book, Regular (Medium), Semi Bold, Bold, and Black. Of course, that isn't allowed either because of Windows. 

[David Bergsland]

Indeed, we'd be delighted to hear!

Much better OpenType feature controls.

[David Bergsland]

I don't think Adam was suggesting the underline be located vertically the same as the underscore, at least I didn't interpret it that way. Ideally the position of the underline would be at or below the descenders, and using the weight of the underscore as a reference for the weight of the underline is a good idea, IMHO.

Actually, I commonly use the underscore for forms (as leaders) so I have consistently put my underscore sitting from the baseline up. But then I never use underline except for links and that should be a separately generated line, right?

[David Bergsland]

Something that is missing in FOG5 is the option to View By (glyph) "Name".  Such a feature is available in Fontlab Studio, but not FOG.

I'm trying to find out why a 2343-glyph font generates a 2341-glyph .otf, and finding it impossible because when viewing by Unicode is selected, only two asterisks are displayed in the font window.  Most of the font is displayed as  **.     To track this problem, I'd have to open each glyph to find out its name then compare it to each glyph in the .otf file -- 2,000 times!

Please add "View By Name" to the wish list. 

Thanks.

Very important! When I open a template with oldstyle figures, small caps, small cap figures, and so on, ALL the additional glyphs have that ** which is worse than useless. None of these glyphs have Unicode names available (as far as I know). It definitely restricts designing, making the addition of OpenType features even more difficult in FOG (IF that were possible). 

[David Bergsland]

Also, I like the way you can view the font window in FontLab at various sizes. Again, this helps catch mistakes, and it would be nice to be able to view the font window at a larger size.

This would be very nice. This is especially true when working on fonts with larger glyph counts. My standard OpenType template has 370 characters and I can never see all of them at once.

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