February 2004 - Inkscape Devel

always-visible color
by bulia byak 21 Feb '04

21 Feb '04

After some fiddling I built a new function for the rubberband/page border color which: 1 intuitively preserves the rectangle's own color and transparency (this is relevant for page border whose color is settable) 2 intuitively inverses the color of the background 3 despite 2, does not have a "blind spot" for gray backgrounds! Regular inversion maps color 808080 to itself, so an inversion rubberband rectangle is invisible over a background with that color. I solved this without introducing rotation or other non-intuitive color transformations. Namely, my function looks _almost_ like inversion over dark backgrounds, but is a bit lighter than pure inversion. Over light backgrounds, on the contrary, it is a bit darker than pure inversion. Between 7f7f7f and 808080, there's a discontinuity that jumps from a-bit-darker to a-bit-lighter or backwards. As a result, there's no color that will render such a selection rectangle invisible. _________________________________________________________________ Find and compare great deals on Broadband access at the MSN High-Speed Marketplace. http://click.atdmt.com/AVE/go/onm00200360ave/direct/01/

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Inkscape 0.38 Roadmap
by Bryce Harrington 21 Feb '04

21 Feb '04

I've taken a butcher's knife to the roadmap and moved a ton of tasks forward, so that for 0.38 we can focus explicitly on bug fixing. Of course, if anyone feels like working on tasks for future releases, please go ahead, it's just that they're not required to be done for this release. So, the trimmed todo list is as follows: * Incorporate (or reject) all patches posted to patch tracker * Knock bug list count down to 10 or fewer, or to a ratio of 10% open/total [all] * Change the SEGV and SIGABRT handlers to reliably autosave and put up a crash dialog * Write an extensions/plugin enhancement proposal(s) and post to mailing list for review There are 3 patches in the patch tracker. I think that should be an easy task to reach closure on. The extensions proposal is necessary for this release because implementing a solution will be the focus for next release. Multiple proposals is fine, but we need at least one, and we'll need concensus on which to use by the time we finish cutting this release. The SEGV and SIGABRT task may be a bit of a challenge but I think it's extremely important for our users. There's little more frustrating for a user than losing the last N hours worth of work. Who would like to take the lead on this task? Bryce

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fullscreen
by bulia byak 20 Feb '04

20 Feb '04

My comments: - the sp_fullscreen function should be perhaps in desktop.cpp, not in verbs.cpp - the planned shortcut for fullscreen is F11 - I don't think f is a good idea, it's easy to press it accidentally - use the last argument of true when registering a shortcut in shortcuts.cpp, so it shows up in the menu - on my KDE 3.14, fullscreen only works properly when there are no other maximized windows. If there's a maximized window and an Inkscape window over it, then calling fullscreen results in unending flashing of these two windows - this can only be stopped by killing Inkscape. Anyone else having this problem? - when I open new document windows from a fullscreen window, they are sometimes on top of it but sometimes they sink under the fullscreen window (can't guess what is the algorithm here). _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/bcomm&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.ms…

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] 0.37 Release Tarball, First experiences
by bulia byak 20 Feb '04

20 Feb '04

>- I can't print gradients. If I draw e.g. a rectangle which is blue in > the middle, changing its colour to red in the outer regions it will be > printed white. I can however export it and then print it using gimp. My guess is that you print via Postscript, and Postscript does not support gradients. When other vector apps export things like transparency or gradients to PS, they "simulate" them, usually by bitmaps. Inkscape does not yet do that. But it's just a guess, your bug may be different. Please do file a bug report. >- fullscreen doesn't work for me. If I click View/Fullscreen nothing > happens. What is the window manager? _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/bcomm&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.ms…

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Hello. Curious about your stance on agg2...
by Dan Ostrowski 20 Feb '04

20 Feb '04

Hello. I was wondering what you inkscape developers think of agg2? ( www.antigrain.com ). It's very VERY fast ( faster than libart from what testing I've seen ) and it's C++ based. It features patterns and all sorts of things.. it's fully featured enough for an SVG program. It would seem to be an excellent match for the C++ rewrite of inkscape. I'm not a great programmer but perhaps I could help out somehow... dan ostrowski

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'dialogs' menu
by MenTaLguY 20 Feb '04

20 Feb '04

Do you all think "Windows" is a better name for the "Dialogs" menu, or does anyone have any better ideas? -mental

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[Fwd: SVG Open 2004 in Japan - Call for Participation]
by Jonathan Phillips 20 Feb '04

20 Feb '04

Ted and anyone else, We should definitely try and get into this conference in JAPAN! Ted, it would be cool to post your presentation and paper up on the wiki and then we can keep adapting and changing and moving parts to other presentations. That way we can distributively get the project out there and while you can present at OSCON, I would love to present at KEIO UNIVERSITY in JAPAN. Maybe we could get a team of us there to present and meet with other SVG folk. Jon

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Extension loading example
by Bob Jamison 20 Feb '04

20 Feb '04

I made a small code example of loading dynamic extensions to something like Inkscape. I put a Zip file of the code here: http://troi.lincom-asg.com/~rjamison/inkscape/ext.zip Basically this does plugin loading Netscape-style. It scans a directory for files beginning with a given prefix ("ix" in this case) and the proper suffix for a shared object (".so" on Unices, ".dll" on Win32). It loads each object, finds a C function called CreateExtension. This is ---MUCH--- easier than linking to C++... Directly linking to a C++ resource on a shared object is fraught with DANGER! It casts the resulting void * to an Extension object, which has virtual overloaded methods for any class extending it. It then calls a few methods on each one, just to show that it is honest. The Makefile works on Linux. I'll make it work on Win32 later. It just needs to use the dlltool to make dll's instead of .so's. But it is Happy Hour right now, and I must keep my priorities straight!! ;-) Hope this is helpful if considering methods of Inkscape extension. Bob

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Joining GNOME Office
by David Bolack 19 Feb '04

19 Feb '04

At 09:59 AM 2/19/2004, Bryce Harrington wrote: >But more importantly I wanted to emphasize that a _strategy_ is needed. >For example, with Inkscape our strategy for competing effectively with >OO Draw is pretty straightforward. First, we shoot for gaining really >good SVG compatibility (OO Draw is weak here, and it seems like SVG is >growing to become an extremely important file format in the open source >community). Second, we try to make the project very enjoyable to work And as important as working with the rest of open source is, it's also important to be reasonably compatible with major closed source apps. So if, for example, Illustrator creates slightly broken SVG's (I'm not picking on Illustrator, I'm not entirely sure it will export them, even.) you need to be able to cope with that somehow.

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Re: 'dialogs' menu
by bulia byak 19 Feb '04

19 Feb '04

>The Gimp saves windows and palettes posittions lately. >Inkscape should do the same. It does. >What is more, There are some Dialogs in 0.37 that >are not keeping themselves on top, like >Tool Options >Item Properties It's because these dialogs are planned for elimination. Their content will go to other dialogs. See the DialogsReorganization page on Wiki. It's also the reason why they don't have shortcuts assigned. _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/bcomm&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.ms…

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