Hacker News Reader

Comment by footlose_3815 | Hacker News Reader

If I read and understand that correctly, they aren't addressing the UX of the editor, but the engine's features instead? Features are nice, but I don't think people want to type their text in a big window before they see it on the canvas.

Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET, and even MS paint let you write text directly on the canvas with an insertion point. The Text tool in Krita is a whole level of abstraction away from being able to see what you want.

View on HN

Yes, on-canvas editing of text is a project for this year, and probably most of next year. All in all we're spending tens of thousands of euros on the text shape and text tool, in the hope that now we're doing this for the fourth time, we can finally nail it.

The main purpose of Krita's text tool is comic book speech bubbles, though, not annotating screen shots.

I make comics and I am pretty sure that a feature set suitable for making word balloons is going to be very much a superset of what you need to annotate screenshots.

Annotation: pick a font/size/color and pick a place to start typing, or drag out a larger, rectangular text box and start typing.

Comics: also those text boxes might need to be ovals/rectangles/some absolutely crazy shape that fits the needs of the page, it's nice to automatically draw a balloon for them too, manage font/size/color across multiple text boxes on multiple pages, and then there's sound effects that start out as a cool font and get pushed around...

I may be biased by working in Illustrator, which has a very mature set of text tools. I hear that Clip/Manga Studio's text tools were barely functional for an embarassing number of years and there sure are a lot of comics people I know who love it despite that.

Clip Studio's text tools are really primitive, yes... And we're aware of the challenges. At least three people in the core team do make comics, too :-) And we want to support vertical text, RTL, ruby and all of that. But in this thread there's a link to a blog post that shows what already has been done, and there's been lots of work done since.

Thank you for being the maintainer, and thanks for this update. You folks are incredible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com