DVD-SP Needs Real Font Control!

Question

+Just sent the following to Apple's DVD SP Feedback; figured I'd post a copy here in case there were any seconders...+
I just had to search the DVD SP Apple Discussion Forum to confirm what I still have great difficulty believing:
That in this FOURTH edition of a "high-end" authoring app, there are STILL no basic font controls, whether for text boxes or text as buttons. You can pick the font, the size, the color, the justification, and turn a shadow on or off -- fine.
But what about leading (the spacing between selected lines)?
What about kerning (the spacing between selected characters)?
What about baseline and tracking controls?
These kinds of text-formatting functions are WAY overdue, especially for an app that claims to be in the "Pro" category. And the workaround -- having to create special graphics in Photoshop just to do some simple adjustments to line and/or character spacing??? -- c'mon.
Please, please, PLEASE get some reasonable font functionality into DVD SP ASAP! (And I'm talking a 4.3-esque update; NOT a wait-till-v5-in-FCStudio3 Upgrade.)
John Bertram
Toronto
(loyal Mac user since 1990)

Answer 1

I wouldn't be surprised if more integration with the features of that OS-based font panel that pops up in DVDSP will be included in future releases. Much emphasis has been placed on the strength of DVDSP as a design as well as an authoring tool. The Apple Pro Training Series books I teach from dedicate the first half of the book to using DVDSP's design tools (which I never thought had much to do with authoring at all, but there you go.)
However, I discovered another issue you should probably take into consideration any time you plan to use DVDSP's menu design features. Using any of these features, text objects, shapes, or any of those doodads or whangdoodles or gewgaws that show up over there in the Palette, it will cause any still menus with any audio or duration to be rendered as motion in your project. This isn't much of an issue, until you need to make a disc that uses lots of still menus with audio.
I have done a few discs that include several hours of music over many still menus. On the last one, I tried to use some text and palette graphics for navigation. I set up probably 30 menus before I started adding the audio. When I put the audio on the menus, my disc size went from 8MB to 10GB. A quick test showed that it was the palette graphics and DVDSP text that was preventing the menus from being treated as stills with audio, instead of rendering them as motion menus. Not only that, but all that rendered motion got embedded in my project bundle, making my project file balloon to serveral gigs as well.
One more reason I almost always just go the photoshop route...