[Bf-committers] Slightly improved text objects, potential inclusion in BF

[Matthew H. Plough]

[read this in a Monty Python singsong-voice]

I am Arthur, King of the Britons, and I command thee, port this 
immediately! 

[stop reading in a Monty Python voice]

Really, this is fantastic stuff.  The quick, manual character kerning 
will bring CG text in Blender to the level of the Character Generator on 
the Amiga Video Toaster 4000.   The years from 1994 to 2005 were the 
dark ages of CG character kerning, apparently -- you bring light to 
those in the caves.  This completely blows away the character generator 
in Newtek's Video Toaster 2, released in ~2003 -- and that's an app 
designed to do this stuff!

Now some crits:

I do agree with Matt Ebb that the Lorem Ipsum generator is a little 
superfluous, but if it doesn't take up too much space, leave it in.  
Microsoft Publisher does that, and it really is nice to get some idea of 
how the rest of your text layout will look. 

This tool could have easily coped with the situation leading to horror 
stories about the Firefox New York Times ad -- modifications took 
forever because of the constant need to re-render. 

It would be nice to have a button inside edit mode to turn off fill, 
simply because not having one is a rather artificial limitation.  I 
don't think that would be too hard to code -- you don't need to provide 
a keyboard shortcut, just a button.

You may want to remove the select/deselect/assign buttons if they do 
nothing, or restructure your selection scheme to allow multiple blocks 
of text to be selected.  The former would most likely be easier, and I 
don't think that leaving those buttons out would hinder workflow. 

Nice job on this.

Matt