linebender / linebender/runebender

Various suggestions

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Dominant language
Rust
Stars
799
Forks
35
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

I have a fresh macOS so went through this fresh, and played with it and took notes on things that occurred to me as I was playing for about 90 minutes... I'm sure many of these things are already known and on the roadmap, but hopefully that I noticed them can be helpful for prioritization :)

- [ ] Better install docs.

brew install rust;
mkdir -p ~/src/github.com/linebender; cd !$;
git clone https://github.com/linebender/runebender.git;
cd runebender;
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/libffi/lib/pkgconfig" cargo build;
cargo run;

I think this should be stated in the README, just in case people from the type community who will be up for an adventure running stuff in Terminal, but don't know the pre-reqs implicitly, can get started.

This is what I saw:

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 19 25 27

- [ ] Nice! I think it could be old-school fun to have a Welcome screen :)
- [ ] This could use a fallback font that shows a glyph typical of each charater, instead of repeating the `?` glyph for all.
- [ ] The design of that `?` can be improved, likely by using one from an existing font (like Inconsolata)
- [ ] There are 52 default glyphs, A-Z and a-z. But there is no space glyph, which is the 3rd most important character after `H` and `O`. Potentially this should be first in the table :)
- [ ] The edit button at the top has parentheses, which seems unnecessary styling
- [ ] Since its running via Terminal exec, there's no alt-tab icon

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 19 25 41

- [ ] When I click the button, the family and style labels can be clicked to make them editable; I suggest therefore the family and style labels on the parent glyphs window don't need an edit button, and similarly should open this dialog when clicked.
- [ ] When I double click the text in the input widget, I expect the whole word to be selected, but this doesn't work
- [ ] When I click the number values to edit them, I expect to be able to hit the up and down arrows to increment them 1 unit using the keyboard interactively (and press shift-up/down to in/decrement by 10 units)
- [ ] I can hit Enter to write the value and return the value from edit state to set state, but pressing Enter again doesn't trigger the 'Done' button as expected
- [ ] I can't go File > Font Info to open this dialog, as expected

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 19 26 42

- [ ] I click a glyph and see the highlight state and the metadata info in the left sidebar. The glyph name is at the top of that info box, but not center aligned, so looks odd, given the unicode character info below is centered.
- [ ] The `0` in the central slot under the glyph preview is unclear. Is that the advance width? **There are no tooltips.**
- [ ] Kern groups before and after are labelled, but there are no values. I suggest to show the values aren't set positively, or, don't display the labels if there are no values to show.
- [ ] The default highlight color is super bright yellow with orange secondary outline; this is a bold choice, but looks nice with the overall grey. However, when the edit state is activated on the input widgets, it was not the same yellow or orange. Maybe an opportunity there to thread the visual design through the app more.

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 19 26 49

- [ ] Double clicking the glyph tile opens the classic glyph editor window as expected. It has a classic top left floating toolbar, although oddly running across instead of down. The pointer is selected, but active state is darker grey, not yellow. The classic status bar is a floating fixed dialog bottom left.
- [ ] The guides show origin, advance width; and the 5 y-dimension alignment values (baseline, plus 4 set in font info dialog from glyphs view; descenders, ascenders, cap height, x height.) These aren't labelled, and there's no View menu option to show labels.
- [x] View, Full Screen, works well :)
- [ ] View, Show|Hide Tab Bar, works, but there's no obvious way to open a new tab, and the current glyph tab is the full width. I expect the tab to be a couple of inches wide, with a `+` button on the right edge of the tab bar or right of the rightmost tab, and a 'text' tool to enter new characters (like GlyphsApp), or a 'string input' (like FontForge), to fill that tab with glyphs.
- [ ] There's no Window menu, which I expect since I have multiple windows.

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 19 27 38

- [x] Holding space fills the glyph, as expected, but fills it bright magenta instead of black, and doesn't set the background canvas white as expected, although does hide all chrome as expected.

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 19 27 48

- [ ] The regular pen tool works well, although I'm not sure how to turn a straight segment into a curve. The default green corner point color is very bright like the yellow glyph tile selection, but the more muted yellow/blue colors don't quite go with it. A new color theme would be good.
- [ ] I struggled to turn lines into curves, as Eli reported in #130
- [ ] App menu doesn't have a Preferences window, and so there's no way to customize those colors immediately and interactively.
- [ ] Both Paths menu tools (reverse, align) work well. An auto "Fix directions" method would be extremely useful, so I don't have to manually/mentally manage it too much.
- [ ] The hand tool shouldn't trigger fill-preview by itself, when I am using that to pan around (especially by tapping `H`) I don't want to see the fill, but I do want the hand tool to be active when holding space.
- [ ] Undo works well, but there's no way to view undo history. This is a large topic ;)

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 19 27 52

- [ ] Editing the number values on the glyph and selection floating palettes works well, but again I expect to be able to up/down and shift-up/down to interactively edit them.

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 19 58 27

- [ ] Right clicking canvas to add guides works well. Double clicking the guide (or right clicking it and choosing the menu item) to flip its orientation works well.
- [ ] But the selection dialog shows X and Y values when only 1 makes sense, and the values aren't updated or editable (edit does nothing; and there's nothing on the console to say this did nothing)
- [ ] There seems no way to set the color, and the default red/pink

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 19 50 38

- [ ] "Hyperpen" is mislabelled as duplicate "Pen"
- [ ] As no preferences, there's no way to customize the hotkeys
- [ ] I would **love** to have a way to define the pull down menus themselves as a user customization feature; this might be something to do after scripting is available, and with the methods for a script to un/register its own pull down menu items, but the design of these is something that I'd love to see users easily engage in. There was an effort to do this with FontForge a few years ago that stalled out; @pathumego, if you have time, I'd be grateful if you could drop some relevant links to that work in a comment here.

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 20 06 38

- [ ] File, Save, doesn't work first time, has to be File, Save As.
- [ ] Despite setting the family name, the default filename is `Untitled.ufo` but I expect `Family-Style.ufo` (so here `Sample-Regular.ufo`)

Then I go, App, Quit Runebender, then run it again, and File, Open, and it opens my UFO and I see my existing glyph data as expected :)

If run the app, and close the first glyph window, I get this INFO in console, and File, Open, no longer opens the Open dialog; and many of the pull down menu items are still active, although obviously inert.

```
$ cargo run
Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.30s
Running `target/debug/runebender`
DEBUG [druid::localization] available locales [], current en-US
DEBUG [druid::localization] resolved: [en-US]
INFO [druid_theme_loader::widget] loaded 45 items to theme
INFO [runebender_lib::app_delegate] window WindowId(1) is not an editor window
```

- [ ] If I run the app, open a glyph, draw something like a square, then go File, Open, the Font Info of the current (unsaved) font changes, but the glyph view does not update with the loaded glyph data. (If I Save, quit, run again, and open, I get the square, and my original has been lost.)

- [ ] File, New, is inactive; I expect that to work.
- [ ] There's no Help menu. The macOS Help, Search, Menu Items feature is slick... but macOS help eBook stuff is not great, I think its better to just have a link to a docs website, and a link to this issue tracker.

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 20 23 34

- [ ] When I double click the title bar of the glyph view window, to maximize the window, there are odd black areas

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading the README installation guidance and reproducing the macOS app with the listed brew, cargo build, and cargo run commands. The issue contains many unrelated suggestions across menus, glyph editing, guides, preferences, file handling, and window behavior, so a contributor would need a narrower scope and an agreed definition of done before choosing one item.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
desktop, documentation
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
12/100

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