Kerning

[HaroldB]

Igor,

Since the text feature in PTE lends itself to creating titles and headlines, I think it's important to have the ability to kern (move the letters closer together and further apart). This would also be very useful for artistic fonts, such as script.

First, it would be good if PTE honored the kerning pairs specified in the TrueType font. It may do so now, but if not, it would be good if it did. (Since you don't want to "break" existing shows, if it doesn't honor it now, perhaps it should be an option for the project.)

Then:

I think that a text field can have a global kerning field, which would be a positive or negative number (positive adding more space between characters and negative decreasing the space. I think these numbers have to be related (ie, proportional) to font size (which can change for each keypoint). (I think the convention is to use some fraction of the width of the letter "m" at the specified font size, but I am not at all sure of that.) I don't think that this field needs to be keypoint-dependent.

Additionally, the space between each two characters in the text should have a number assigned to it. I'd get the list by pressing a button on the O&A dialog box, and I could type a value (positive or negative) to change the relative positioning of the two characters.

Setting the global kerning field for the text field would set that value for all the pairs. If the user types a value into the global field, and there are values in the pair table that are not equal to the old value of the global field, I'd prompt the user with "There are xxx letter pairs that have a kerning value different than the old global kerning value". Allow him to use the new kerning value for all fields, or only for fields that have the old global kerning value.

I think there should also be a way of visually moving the letters. Perhaps selecting the text character and holding Shift down while dragging would move the character in the direction of the drag? Since dragging may not be precise enough, perhaps Shift+Arrow as an alternative? The problem with this is that you most often want to move all the rest of the characters on the line, too, so this might need some more thought.

H