Alright, my cursor changes and inline size changes have been merged, which means we can start testing!
All the changes are in the nightly, so to get yourself a copy of Krita that can edit text, go to krita.org, and get the Krita: Next build for your operating system. I’ve already made some basic changes to the text tool docs, which you can read here, but you can, of course, just jump right in.
Some notes:
- Again, this is only plain text editing, inserting text, deleting text, selecting text all works, but no changing font size, weight or underlines yet. Such rich text editing is in the cards too, but for now I’ve focused on getting the on canvas text editing just right, which, as I’ve been working on this over a month, was very necessary.
- You can create simple pre-formatted text and wrapped text by clicking and dragging respectively. You can also set the writing mode to vertical or right to left with the new toggles in the text tool options. Creating a text-in-shape or text-on-path is however not possible yet, as I’ve not had the chance to discuss how to handle that properly with the other devs.
- Input methods work, however, there’s various bugs on various platforms. For one, Qt doesn’t always interpret the input from Japanese IME as containing several segments. The longpress on MacOS doesn’t work. On Linux, Ibus-Mosc is known to crash (ibus anthy is fine and we have switched the fcitx plugin so the decorations aren’t weird anymore). And we haven’t found a way to prevent the suggestions from overlapping the edited text when the text is in vertical. Finally, the virtual keyboard on windows seems to act weird, and I won’t know why until I have a windows dev machine available for debugging.
- You will need to create new texts, as the SVG 1.1 texts of previous Krita need some conversion before being ready to be edited. I won’t be able to make any such converters until rich text editing is complete, as I need to be able to change a ton of properties.
- Text made in Inkscape is somewhat in need of this too, because for some reason the Inkscape devs defaulted saving text with a property that says ‘don’t wrap please’, I reported this to them, and it seems like it will be fixed in the next version.
Overal, what I’d like to know from you:
- How does text creation feel?
- We tried to play with using pressure to make sure that if you accidentally touched the tablet you wouldn’t create a text but then reverted it. Do you think it is necessary?
- How does text editing feel? Do the cursor icons make sense to you?
- We’ve implemented snapping for both text creation, moving and inline-size editing. How does the snapping feel?
- Now, this is is a bit technical, but how do you feel about the little round dot?
- It represents the text origin point. We were unsure whether it should be this or the initial text position. both have their values, in particular when moving the text around, as right now its where it snaps to.
In Krita, the initial text position of a text is always at its origin point, so you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, but for example, Inkscape will always offset the text from its origin point, and if you open texts made with inkscape, you will see that their text has the little dot offset. - So… Should the little dot be the initial text position? The origin point? Should it exist at all? And where would you like to snap text to?
- It represents the text origin point. We were unsure whether it should be this or the initial text position. both have their values, in particular when moving the text around, as right now its where it snaps to.
While you guys test, I kind of hope to finally discuss the technical bits of the text shape with one of the other devs and generally discuss how to proceed with the text shape so I can work on rich text editing after this.
Feel free to ask any other text related questions too 