If Pencil2D had text tools, it would require fonts, that the letter, numbers and punctuation marks.
To build a typeface, that’s the technical term, for the above, collection of characters.
This is a large project, just for a single typeface. To use a typeface, within a package, requires a licence and that cost money.
If an individual Pencil2D user, uses say Inkscape to produce some text and they then export this, as a .png file, with transparency into Pencil2D. That’s allowed, without licence fees being paid. This is because the software supplier, has paid the required licence fee.
No, there’s no text tool because no one has built one. It’s not a question of license requirement because afaik all the fonts that comes with your operation system are prepaid. Most fonts that you download off the internet require license to use in commercial context but can be used freely otherwise.
It’s strictly a question of someone being willing to implement a text tool.
It’s a matter of the time and effort spent in the implementation, when compared with the benefits!
Yes exactly. The main purpose of Pencil2D is animation, and we’re focusing on that part. A simple text tool may come down the line, but to me it’s a low priority. There are many tools to solve that problem better and more satisfying, in post production. If you really want text in your environment, for a background, dialog or something, then either draw it or import it from an application that has it.
Thank you for the suggestion, but I don’t think it’s that necessary in order to provide a basic text tool. The toolkit we use in Pencil2D already provides text-painting routines, so building a text tool out of that shouldn’t be terribly difficult. Like so often in this project, the problem lies not so much in the difficulty of the task but in the lack of manpower. Pencil2D is made by a small group of volunteers and there is no shortage of other tasks vying for our limited spare time – such as addressing the performance issues that affect our bitmap engine, which is currently being worked on. As MrStevns wrote above, adding a text tool simply isn’t the highest priority for us right now. If you would like to see a text tool added to Pencil2D sooner rather than later, the best way to make it happen is to get your own hands dirty or to recruit a new developer to join in on the project and work on it for you – in other words, by contributing additional manpower to the project. Whether we can grab code from another project or not, on the other hand, most likely won’t have any effect on when this gets done.
I am not able to help with the code, but i have written at a brilliant guy from france to jump into the code of pencil2D. Hopefully he may be interested. We will see in the next weeks.