[Bf-funboard] Proposition for Blender 2.7/2.8: Text Engine

[Bastien Montagne]

Hi,

Yes, full rtl UI may also be a goal, of course, but imho it’s far less 
priority that a good complex script text handling (simply because 
wrongly placed/ordered letters make a text very hard to read, while 
"strange" order of controls and such one can adapt to). Further more, 
mirroring Blender UI would be a much bigger task (we would need first to 
get rid of many hacks/tweaks/flaws our UI code currently has, and then 
most probably make in-depth changes all over the code) – even though 
some limited support (like mirroring widgets themselves) may be quite 
easy to achieve.

As for the “animation of the text body”, if I understand correctly (i.e. 
animating the content of a text 3D object over time), it is already 
possible through drivers... Anyway, this is not really related to text 
engine topic, which should only handle text layout and drawing, as well 
as featuring to editing tools info about graphemes...

And I must insist that this proposition mostly concerns UI. The fact 
that it may be useful to 3D text objects, and possibly other stuff too 
(through e.g. a py api) is only a “side effect”. ;)

Cheers,
Bastien

On 26/07/2013 23:16, David Jeske wrote:
> Text-handling is a good start, but only a small part of supporting RTL,
> bidi, or TTB/BTT languages. In fact large sections of the UI need to be
> flipped / reoriented to correspond with right-to-left meaning.
>
> http://www.i18nguy.com/MiddleEastUI.html
>
> For example, in RTL:
>
> - timeline needs to be flipped
> - timeline-playhead buttons need to be flipped.
> - node-system needs to be X-axis flipped (inputs on the right, outputs on
> the left)
> - layout orientations need to be X-flipped (left-most panels on the right
> and vice versa)
> - subpanel headers and layouts need to be flipped (header-triangles on the
> right, layouts x-flipped)
> - editor-type headers need to be flipped (start on the right, not the left)
>
> Supporting TTB/BTT languages is even more involved.
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 8:20 AM, Bastien Montagne<montagne29 at wanadoo.fr>wrote:
>
>> Currently our text handling in UI is very basic, it works well for basic
>> languages like “european” ones, but not for complex ones (arabic and
>> other RTL, Indic familly, etc.). As we support more and more real i18n,
>> it becomes very annoying for users willing to translate or type in there
>> native language (chars are not drawn in the good order, cursor
>> navigation and text selection is wrong, etc.).
>>
>> So I took some hours in the past two days to setup a first draft of a
>> proposition to get a real text engine inside Blender, available here:
>> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Mont29/Text_Engine_Reflections .
>>
>> Feedback is obviously most welcomed! :D
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Bastien.
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