Glyph (or character) selector

[dopelover]

Hi.

Sometimes I need to insert some special characters (eg. diameter symbol, pi, etc.) into drawings made with Inkscape. It is really hard thing to do with Inkscape. I usually open Oppenoffice and insert desired characters using Openoffice "Insert special character" dialog and then copy needed symbols into Inkscape. There is an another way to deal with special characters, I mean to insert unicode codes directly with pressed ALT key but most of popular Linux window managers have ALT key binded to window management actions by default. So inserting symbols this way requires to reconfigure your window manager. Another weakness of inserting unicode codes with ALT key into inkscape is that an user must know the codes.

So I propose to implement a dialog for easy inserting of special characters.
There is an image attached to this report illustrating my idea.

Sorry for my poor english.

[prkos (prkos)]

It would be nice to have such a feature in Inkscape.

I also sometimes use Open Office for inserting special characters, and sometimes use unicode directly into Inkscape (if I know the code) but I use Shift + Ctrl + u + + + [unicode]. For example hold Shift and Ctrl and don't release while typing u+0074 to get letter "t". AFAIK Alt is the Windows modifier to insert unicode.

[Guillermo Espertino (Gez) (gespertino-gmail)]

prkos: It's not exactly like that. When you press CTRL+SHIFT+U it changes to unicode insertion mode. You can release the keys and enter the unicode number of the character you need. You commit the insertion with enter.
Anyway, that's the way to do it at the moment and as dopelover says, it's not very handy because you have to remember the codes (the character map utility helps, but having a dialog with common special characters would be very useful).

[dopelover (dopelover)]

I prepared a mockup of a dialog to insert special characters. See the attached file.

[Alexandre Prokoudine (alexandre-prokoudine)]

I'm sorry, but I think that we should just blindly copy the dialog from Scribus/SVN which also has sets of special character that can be shared between apps :)

[dopelover (dopelover)]

Well. The Scribus dialog is even better than my proposal so don't keep me waiting too long for it ;)

[Diederik van Lierop (mail-diedenrezi)]

Another work around is to use the character map provided by your operating system. On Fedora its found in the start menu under Applications -> Accessories, and in Windows XP use Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools. You can then select any character, copy it, and paste it into Inkscape.

It would indeed be great if Inkscape had such a character map integrated though.

[Pablo Trabajos (pajarico)]

I changed the title of the report because I thought it was a bit too vague. There are already other bug reports with ideas for improving the text tool, someone should start a blueprint for that :)

[Jon A. Cruz (jon-joncruz)]

Rough cut is in. Minor refinements will go in before release, but the base feature is there.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

revision 9268 fails to build:

  CXX verbs.o
verbs.cpp:76:30: error: ui/dialog/glyphs.h: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [verbs.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

both new files (from src/ui/dialog/Makefile_insert) are missing:
 ui/dialog/glyphs.cpp
 ui/dialog/glyphs.h

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

Make error confirmed on Ubuntu 9.10.

[Jon A. Cruz (jon-joncruz)]

Oops. Files were missing from add. Corrected in revision 9269.

[lemasney (lemasney-gmail)]

Great wok here, Jon. This solves aproblem for Mac OS users because of the problems of copying/pasting with X11 from native apps, like a character selector.

However, in using the beautiful rough cut tonight, I wasn't able to use it as expected, and I wonder if maybe I'm imagining that it will do more than it will.

When i open the glyphs dialog, select a dingbats font, such as wingdings, double click the item I want, it shows up in the field near the bottom of the dialog. I can copy it from there, and then paste it, using the text tool. However, the pasted text is showing up as something besides what I copied and pasted. So then I notice that the font is the default font, so i choose Wingdings, then paste again, but still it shows a semicolon instead of a printer's mark. I can do this on a few different fonts, where especially when it is not simply basic ascii, it doesn't come over into the canvas. What am I doing wrong?

Also, the way that I loved this tool in Corel Draw was that it allowed for a drag and drop from the dialog to the canvas, at which point it was immediately autoconverted to a path. I was hoping beyond hope that this glyphs dialog would do that too. Maybe it's too soon for 0.48, but a possibility for 0.49? I'd gladly donate for the feature, though I'd donate regardless.

Love what's been done in an amazingly short time. Thanks!

[Jon A. Cruz (jon-joncruz)]

A few things need to be implemented (in rough order of planned implementation order):

* Have "Insert" button apply the selected glyphs directly into the currently selected text object.
* Display preview using the selected font
* Drag text/glyphs directly to the canvas
* Fix copy-n-paste safely on all platforms (OS X is especially troublesome in this regard)
* Add an option to a drop menu to drop and convert to glyphs.

The first two are probably doable in the immediate time frame. Dragging to the canvas will take changes to our context mechanism, so will take a while to get in robustly. The latter two are somewhat independent issues. Definitely feel free to add individual bugs on those last three points.

[lemasney (lemasney-gmail)]

I'm going to go ahead and put those in now, as per your request. I'm very excited about this feature set, and very appreciative of the work you do.

[Neil Dökkalfar (neil-next-touch)]

Nice feature, two comments though:

- Like Scribus, it lacks support for glyphs not mapped to Unicode. Those glyphs are only accessible by their index in the font and where also non insertable using the Ctrl-U feature.

- Why are the glyphs displayed with different faces?

Thanks a lot for the feature!

[MikeOtto (motto)]

The Glyph viewer in the most recent build is a great step in the right direction. Since it does not render the actual glyph character in the font I'm trying to view (ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro), it would be helpful if it displayed the numbered grid like the Mac OS X glyph viewer does. That way I'd be able to cross reference the two and select the weird characters by their place on the grid. The better solution would be if the Glyph viewer actually rendered the font you were looking at.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Follow-up reports:
Bug #555550 “Drag and Drop missing for Glyphs dialog. ”
Bug #555553 “Apply-as-path missing for Glyphs dialog.”
Bug #555557 “Copy and Paste inconsistent for Glyphs dialog”

Lastest:
Bug #696253 “Adjustable size of glyphs in Glyphs dialog”

[Diederik van Lierop (mail-diedenrezi)]

Can't live without the Glyph Selector any more :-) !

Two minor things that could be improved someday:
- default to the font-family that's active in the text tool
- in the second drop-down control: hide the ranges which don't have any characters

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Follow-up reports:
Bug #951288 “Unapplicable scripts and Unicode blocks listed in Glyphs dialog”
Bug #1064940 “Insert Glyph as first character not supported”