Are there technical\design reasons there are no vertical alignment options for text in GIMP?

Question

By this I mean to align to the top/middle/bottom of the text entry box (which seems reasonably pointless to have a vertical size without these options).

I found reddit and Gimptips have more drawn out methods/discussions about how to do it.

Is vertical alignment not something that fits the typical purpose of GIMP? Or graphics design reasons to exclude the option? Or perhaps there's a known technical issue making it more challenging in such editors?

Or is it just a matter of the developers not seeing it as a priority? None of my search results hit anything from their site indicating it has been proposed (in fact, I couldn't find where to propose features at all, only bugs?)

Answer 1

No there is no reason for such feature to not exist other than priority. But please note that this is a sort of a arbitrary decissson both ways. For example there is no such option in Photoshop either! You can oviously achieve the same thing by aligning the layer in both applications.

Now there is indeed a problem with doing this. In that its not so clearly defined how you should calculate the center. What do you use a as a height metric for the font? The x height? The height of the tallest character? The height fo say capital X? and so on. Then there is the fact that arithmetic centering is not the same as optical centering. All of which can be solved by choosing an arbitrary definition. This can be done InDesign does it.

But then again all of this is still pretty arbitrary. There still is no way for me to align 2/3 of the way, or by some other definition of middle.