[CREATE] ink/paper simulation

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

Greetings, gents and ladies

A while ago Yuri Yarmola, lead developer of FontLab (which seems to be
the most popular proprietary font design/production tool now), ran a
survey (http://yarmola.livejournal.com/5333.html, it's in Russian,
sorry) in his LJ blog to ask users what superfeatures they would love
to see in further versions of the application.

Well, one of the users came up with a very smart idea: a (Corel
Painter-like) tool to simulate real paper and inks to see what
actually would happen to glyphs printed with a small font size with
different inks on different surfaces and with different colors, taking
trapping into consideration as well, especially on problematic parts
of shapes (narrow serifs, stroke variation etc., I fancy). A
font-proof, in fact. So a type designer could see this and apply
tweaks to his design. Naturally, Yuri got interested in the idea.

Now here is what I think. While this surely would be great for type
design, there is a lot of application of such a technology in other
domains. Presumably users of every design app would want that. E.g. if
you are someone like Josh Andler :) who draws attractive females with
lots of thin long hair in Inkscape, you wouldn't want to see a RIP
choke on your drawing and you'd rather apply your tweaks before you do
hard proofs (and especially if you don't do hard proofs).

So what I'd love to find out is:

1. Is anybody else thinking that it's a good idea?
2. Would anybody agree to help integrating such a functionality to
whoever works on core technology?

And then:

3. How much of the presumed core technology is already covered in Krita?
(optional for now: 4. What would be the best way of doing this UI wise?)

And of course:

5. Is anybody volunteering? :)

Surely this is a very complex task which requires a lot of both
theoretical and practical work. Which leads to:

6. In case Google runs a GSoC next year, should CREATE step in as an
organisation itself to facilitate work on such inter-organization
projects?

I'm CCing to George Williams, Robert Krawitz and Alastair M. Robinson,
because they could provide very sensible feedback from the
fonts/printing perspective (and George, I do know you have not so much
time it your disposal lately :)), and Peter Sikking -- in case he
thinks he has something to say from UI perspective.

Alexandre