Improved character selector

[Loïc Corbasson]

Am Mittwoch 28 März 2007 14:11 schrieb Andreas Hartmetz:
> On Wednesday 28 March 2007 12:26:01 Jos van den Oever wrote:
> > 2007/3/27, Loïc Corbasson <loic.corbasson at gmail.com>:
> > > An even better option would be full-text search, so typing '<', 'less
> > > than', or 'math' would return a set of results including the '<' glyph,
> > > IMHO.
> >
> > This is a case where search-by-drawing could shine.
>
> That would be a cool feature, but:
>
> Expect to spend a large amount of time figuring out a comparison
> algorithm... What I came up with for mouse gestures can be found in
> kdelibs/kdeui/shortcuts/kgesture.cpp, KShapeGesture::distance(), and that
> is a simple case:
> - in that application it's a feature to distinguish the directions in which
> lines are drawn.
> - shapes are rather simple
> - shapes are contiguous.
>
Another problem is: can users really draw the shape of a glyph with the mouse? 
Drawing an arrow is already difficult for some, so drawing an 'a' might be  
hard, in particular for the very users I suppose you intend to help with such 
a feature: newbies. The feature would of course be nice, and if we all had 
graphic tablets this would be great IMHO, but I think that in the current 
situation where few people can draw something recognisable with their 
pointing device this would not be used very frequently, apart from the tiny 
minority with tablets. But maybe I'm wrong - I'm a little biased as I rarely 
use mouse gestures, being a keyboard addict :)

Best regards,

Loïc