10-18-2018, 10:09 PM
(10-18-2018, 04:45 PM)adrianh Wrote:(10-05-2018, 03:15 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: When you said "Is there any possibility that font weight will be added to the gimp in the future?" you implied that given a font, the software can compute a light or heavy version. This is not true.
Sorry, but it is, though I think I understand your confusion.
(10-05-2018, 03:15 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: The font must come with several variants (each hand-tweaked by the font author) and all the software does is pick a specific variant. Each variant has specific "font attributes" (fonts work roughly the same in Windows, OSX and Linux, even if some font formats are trickier than other to use.
What you are referring to may apply to bitmap fonts, which would require a different image tweak for a different weight and require that the font designer have to tweak them based on that attribute (and others). Though I don't know the internals in detail, vector fonts (E.g. TrueType Fonts) are calculated based on splines. Do they have tweaks for specific attributes? Maybe, but they are still calculated with weight being one of the attributes taken into consideration. Even if a font has several variants and GIMP is arbitrarily selecting one of them, the font would be selected based on specific attributes, where weight is one of them.
What I am proposing is to expose the weight attribute so as to allow the font to be display the same way as Windows does, or lighter (as GIMP is doing now) or perhaps even heavier if so desired.
No. For most fonts, you cannot apply a mathematical transform to produce the Italic variant from the plain variant, for instance (in the Windows API you could apply a "shear" to fonts to make them look italic but it was a stopgap measure for font with no italic variant). And you can't either for the bold variant:
Notice how the italic variant is radically different (more curves) while only some parts of the bold variant are enlarged (the size of the serif remains about the same). Another thing that doesn't show is the slightly different kerning. These are three different set of splines... Also many fonts (TrueType or OpenType, which are vector....) come with more weights than just plain and bold. If these could all be computed from the plain version, would not it be simpler to have a single font and a "weight" slider?
Furthermore, even within a given variant, computing a rendering at a given size is more complicated than it looks, the smaller sizes are slightly distorted to increase readability (if you ever wondered what the "Hinting" selector is about in the Text tool options).