MSL - kerning (ie. letter spacing) and/or QueryFontMetrics

[pooco]

kerning / basic letter spacing would be a very good thing.

[magick]

So much to do-- so little time. We have kerning on our list of things to do with MSL but we also have 300 other enhancements pending.

[pooco]

may i be as bold as to suggest that if you guys beefed up MSL and typography control that you'd get more enterprise/commercial use (and thus perhaps funding)? the idea of XML-configured layouts is a great one; however, i dont think MSL is quite ready for extensive use given how spotty the feature support is.

i just started writing a generic scripty/XML parser that will take an xml file to define text and background layers (with one-line effects like drop shadow) and interface with various graphic packages to create the desired product. MSL would have filled that niche if it were fleshed out more.

i'm stuck between needing to copy a designer's layout perfectly and crank out (potentially) thousands of variations. specifically, this would be a very handy feature for all the customized social networking sites out there. we just found it very difficult with MSL.

not to knock it... IM is unparalleled in most other respects.

[magick]

See http://www.imagemagick.org/script/conjure.php sometime tomorrow to see how to use the new query-font-metrics tag.

[pooco]

awesome, thank you! i'll take a look at this tomorrow.

is there a reason you guys don't include every feature normally available to the commandline? it ended up being easier for us to write an XML parser that translated everything to the script's API.

[magick]

Many of the command line options are supported. We add support for missing elements whenever someone asks for them.

[pooco]

-shadow was the first one we reached for, but MSL is an iffy choice since you can't immediately tell what is supported and what isn't. it would be nice to have more 1:1 translation between the API and MSL.

i'd like to make a formal request for all of the methods to be added. does this take a large amount of dev time?

[magick]

We currently have over 300 requests for bug fixes and enhancements. 1:1 support of MSL and PerlMagick is on the list but we currently do not have time to fully accomplish this task. However, we do like to remind users that ImageMagick is open-source and anyone can contribute bug fixes, patches, and enhancements. If you have just a few unsupported options (less than five) you would like to add support for now we can find the time for that. Just post your list here.

[magick]

Ok, done (patch available sometime tomorrow).