OpenType Glyph HUD

[Frank Jonen]

Can we have like a HUD type panel that activates when in typography editing mode (maybe a checkbox so it's not annoying when you don't want it)?

Scenario: You select a character and below it a panel with all the optional glyphs shows up, hovering over previews the glyph in-place, clicking confirms it.

[fde101]

Why not make that a submenu in the context menu instead?

[MikeW]

2 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Why not make that a submenu in the context menu instead?

Because on-screen ala CorelDraw is better in a drawing application. However, I'm pretty sure I would shut it off in APub. Well, for a flier or brochure I would turn it on.

One can use the Typography panel to see a preview. But it is pretty small.

[MikeW]

Here's CD and its on-screen display of alternates.

[fde101]

ok...  then I would suggest adding accents to that as well.  If you highlight an "a" then give the options for "àáâãäå" and the like, to expand on the usefulness.  If it were to look like the picture that @MikeW provided, then these could be smaller along one of the edges, possibly in addition to the unaccented form, and if they themselves had alternates, then selecting one of them could change the displayed set of alternates to those for the selected accent character.

[MikeW]

2 hours ago, fde101 said:

ok...  then I would suggest adding accents to that as well.  If you highlight an "a" then give the options for "àáâãäå" and the like, to expand on the usefulness.  If it were to look like the picture that @MikeW provided, then these could be smaller along one of the edges, possibly in addition to the unaccented form, and if they themselves had alternates, then selecting one of them could change the displayed set of alternates to those for the selected accent character.

 

It works with whatever glyphs the font author cares to include. What it doesn't do is simply list all available glyphs. So in the example above, accented glyphs do show the variants, but only when starting with an accented glyph. If you want to start with a non-accented glyph but change to an accented one, there is always the glyph browser.