Towards an Ideal OpenType User Interface

Kris Sowersby:

I like InDesign. I think it’s a good application. However, as a maker and seller of fonts, it pains me that a poor interface hinders and obfuscates the OpenType features I build into my fonts. I am certain all other type foundries feel the same. I would love InDesign — and all OpenType-savvy apps — to honour and respect the work we put into our fonts. This also means respecting the user, whether she be a student or professional.

Gerry Leonidas says “prototyping the proposed interface will need to be done in an app-agnostic way, and from a document designer perspective.” He’s absolutely right. My proposals are therefore not limited to InDesign. Anyone is free to steal these ideas!

Much of what he’s proposing is very similar to the typography palette built into Mac OS X’s text system. What I find absurd is that you can use many of these features in TextEdit (Apple’s free text editor), but not in Pages (Apple’s purportedly professional word processor). They worked up through Pages ’09, but were sacrificed in the name of iOS and web app compatibility.

★ Wednesday, 29 October 2014