Various suggestions

[davelab6]

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:

• [ ] 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

• [ ] 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

• [ ] 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.

• [ ] 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.

• [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.

• [ ] 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 ;)

• [ ] 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.

• [ ] 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

• [ ] "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.

• [ ] 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.

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

[0xpr03]

Also how do I get some example .ufo files ? I was just curious about this project and searching the web didn't show much about where you can get some (free?) .ufo font files.

[alerque]

Try babelfont to convert any font in nearly any format into a UFO. FontForge and many other font editors can also do this conversion. There are also plenty of open source fonts that use UFO sources, for example Raleway and some of the others from @theleagueof.

Do note that Runebender currently will not play nicely with UFOs created in other editors. It currently refuses to save them for fear of overwriting some bit of them it didn't understand. You can only save fonts that were created in Runebender. Try Baby Shark for an existing open source project with UFOs created in Runebender so they are easier to play with.

[0xpr03]

Try Baby Shark for an existing open source project with UFOs created in Runebender so they are easier to play with.

How do I open this with runebender ? There is no .ufo file inside, or do I have to convert it ?

[alerque]

UFOs are not files, they are directories. On some platforms such as macOS they can appear as "packages" where the finder presents the entire directory as an object, but Linux for example doesn't support this.

Runebender expects the path to the UFO directory as the first argument. For example if testing out Runebender from a Git clone of this project, you can compile and run it like this (using your path to the Baby Shark projct).

$ cargo run -- ~/projects/github/baby-shark/sources/BabyShark-Regular.ufo

Note that on Linux at least the File→Open selection dialog box is broken and you can't select UFOs. See #108 for the relevant bug tracking issue.

[0xpr03]

Ah ok, I know there is a folder-selection dialog in windows, but currently that isn't shown, only the "file selection" dialog for .ufo files.

[cmyr]

Oops, had a comment in here from a few days ago that didn't get posted: in any case: good notes dave, happy to have new eyes on things. A lot of the stuff you touch on is definitely important, and it's nice to see it enumerated.

On the file opening: good to be reminded of this, I've definitely been principally been working on macOS the last half-year or so.

[eliheuer]

@davelab6 The magenta fill color thing is fixed in this PR, note how easy this is with the theme system! People can make PRs like this without touching any Rust code: https://github.com/linebender/runebender/pull/246/files

[davelab6]

nice :)

[davelab6]

Going over Zulip, I see @eliheuer mentioned wanting

a way to keep the off-curve points horizontal or vertical

I think this is useful for both regular and hyper beziers :)