June 2004 - Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

node locking
by Kees Cook 12 Jun '04

12 Jun '04

This is in the RFE tracker, I think, but I thought of it again while reading the layer/group/selection thread. The quick summary: I hate the "dia" program. I want to use inkscape for all my diagrams, but it lacks the ability to link objects. One idea was to lock nodes together so that if one moves, so do the others linked to it. How difficult is this? - Defining a UI for locking/unlocking nodes. When in "node edit" mode, something needs to happen to change the view so a second node can be selected from another object. - I assume SVG doesn't have any concept of this, so another inkscape-named identifier would need to be added to describe locked nodes. - The preview renderer probably won't show the "true" result, since it would probably only work on the selected object? -- Kees Cook @outflux.net

2 1

RE: [Inkscape-devel] window focus confusions
by bulia byak 12 Jun '04

12 Jun '04

> 1. make it visually obvious (perhaps the selection could change colour) >which >window my dialog actions will affect, or Yes, that might be useful. I thought about that too. Please add a RFE. > 2. to lock the "active" window (maybe the last one actually edited?) to >consequent dialog actions. No, I don't think it's going to be intuitive. >Or maybe there's another, more obvious way to solve it. For example: 3. Turn off "focus follows mouse" :) 4. Use maximized document windows. I always use them, except I when need to compare two documents side by side (rarely). _________________________________________________________________ http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=ht…

4 3

Re: [Inkscape-devel] layers
by bulia byak 12 Jun '04

12 Jun '04

>When I'm doing comic projects in inkscape, the way I typically have it >organized is each panel is a set of: I'm not quite sure what is a "panel" but I think all this is covered by the "named selections" (or better cal them "sets") idea. Here are a few more UI tweaks for it: - When you happen to manually select exactly the objects that make up one of the sets, that set's name is displayed in the combo box - the same end result as if you selected the name from the list and thus caused it to be selected. - When one of the names is shown in that combo box, you can erase it, which results in removing this set from the list of defined sets. (Objects remain, they're just not in the set anymore.) Maybe a small button near the box can also be added for this purpose. - When you select something and then type the name of a set in the combo box (rather than select that name from the list), the current selection is added to that set, rather than replace it. - In the Object Properties dialog, add a Sets field next to Id, which would list (and allow you to edit) a comma-separated list of sets that the currently selected object belongs to. For multiple selections, list only those sets to which all selected objects belong. - In the same dialog, enable the visible/active checkboxes to be applicable to any number of selected objects. That will let you select one of the sets and hide/unhide it with a couple of clicks. _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN Premium http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=ht…

2 1

RE: pango again
by bulia byak 12 Jun '04

12 Jun '04

>what should fuzzy font matching do? (i admit i haven't >really looked into what it was doing) It has almost nothing to do with actual fonts, it only does a lot of string parsing - breaking CSS family specification into tokens, comparing them to the names of all available fonts, and selecting the best match based on various priorities and weights. I'll look at how Pango does its matching but I think we'll need to keep most of, if not all, of this fuzzy matching code (which even does some cashing to speed up matching - this turned out necessary for documents such as keys.svg). Likely we'll ask for a list of font names (families and styles) from Pango, do our fuzzy matching, and request the font with the best name we found. > > 5. Symbol fonts still don't work. When I select > > Symbol font in the list, I > > get > >argh. some error checking is needed. tho it's strange >that the symbol font doesn't have a charmap. how is >the unicode<->glyph conversion done? PfaEdit (a highly recommended font editor btw) reports that symbol.ttf (from a Windows installation) uses "Symbol" encoding, and it correctly shows all its characters. So perhaps it's just a special encoding that we need to support. >pango layout should do the trick, with one caveat: >since you can only specify one font for the layout, >for the dominant direction, all the text in the >opposite direction gets a default font from pango. if >you have idea on how to tell pango to choose one >specific font... Well, in this case one can put the opposite-direction fragments to be in <tspan>s in SVG, and set a font for them. Anyway, this is much better than not having RTL before. Unfortunately I can't compile the Windows build today - errors during linking: libinkscape.a(inkscape.o)(.text+0x1a6):inkscape.cpp: undefined reference to `sp_marshal_VOID__POINTER_UINT' libinkscape.a(document.o)(.text+0x194):document.cpp: undefined reference to `sp_marshal_VOID__DOUBLE_DOUBLE' libinkscape.a(view.o)(.text+0x136):view.cpp: undefined reference to `sp_marshal_BOOLEAN__VOID' libinkscape.a(view.o)(.text+0x1e7):view.cpp: undefined reference to `sp_marshal_VOID__DOUBLE_DOUBLE' etc. I used to get such errors before from time to time and I don't really know how to fix them. Any help is appreciated. _________________________________________________________________ Free yourself from those irritating pop-up ads with MSn Premium. Get 2months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=ht…

3 2

win build error
by bulia byak 11 Jun '04

11 Jun '04

Ted, here's the error I get when trying to crosscompile for windows: extension/implementation/script.cpp: In member function `gchar* Inkscape::Extension::Implementation::Script::solve_reldir(SPRepr*)': extension/implementation/script.cpp:90: error: `INKSCAPE_EXTENSIONDIR' undeclared (first use this function) Is this something you can fix? _________________________________________________________________ MSN Premium: Up to 11 personalized e-mail addresses and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=ht…

1 0

window focus confusions
by Johan Forsberg 11 Jun '04

11 Jun '04

Hello, I've been using Inkscape fairly often lately and there's one thing in particular that has been annoying me a bit. If I keep more than one image-window open, and want to use e.g. the fill/stroke-dialog, there's always a chance that my wm changes focus to the wrong image-window while my pointer travels between the windows. This happens naturally if the windows overlap so that the wrong window is between the right window and the dialog. If this happens, whatever I do in the dialog will affect the wrong window/object. I realise that maybe I'm in the minority who swear by the "sun mouse" behaviour, but I'm not prepared to part with it on the account of one program :) So, I wonder if there could be an intuitive way to either 1. make it visually obvious (perhaps the selection could change colour) which window my dialog actions will affect, or 2. to lock the "active" window (maybe the last one actually edited?) to consequent dialog actions. Or maybe there's another, more obvious way to solve it. But I think as it works now, it's potentially confusing to new users. I can get around it by organizing my windows, but it's still easy to slip. Thanks! -- Johan Forsberg

1 0

RE: pango again
by bulia byak 11 Jun '04

11 Jun '04

Hi Fred, your patch is fantastic! Most everything works out of the box and the text looks really smooth with subpixel positioning. (No more autohinting, yay!) Even letterspacing works as before. I posted your patch to the tracker, please attach updated versions there. Here are the issues (all of the below is on Linux; I'll try to build it on Windows later today and report results in a separate message): 1. Convert to path distorts lettershapes. I attached a sample to the patch tracker. Compare the red "a" (path) with underlying black "a" (glyph). Looks like all bezier control points became closer to the nodes. 2. Some fonts are badly distorted. I attach (also in the tracker) one such font that is used in the same lettershape-distortions.svg. When converted to path, however, these distortions disappear, although the resulting path is still wrong as described in 1. above. 3. I see you disabled all the fuzzy font matching and name parsing code in nr-type-fontdirectory. Do you think it will be difficult to reenable it with your code? I have written a good deal of that file so I could now try to reenable it. Any hints you might give are welcome. 4. Kerning pairs in fonts still don't work. I thought Pango would provide that automatically - or is some additional support needed? 5. Symbol fonts still don't work. When I select Symbol font in the list, I get ** (inkscape:25358): WARNING **: Unable to load unicode charmap from font file /home/d/.fonts/SYMBOL.TTF ** (inkscape:25358): WARNING **: Unable to open font file /home/d/.fonts/SYMBOL.TTF for font Symbol 512, falling back to /usr/share/fonts/console8x8.pcf.gz ** (inkscape:25358): WARNING **: Error in FT_Set_Char_Size: 23 Haven't yet checked Hebrew or Arabic. Is right-to-left supposed to work now? If not what is needed to make it work? _________________________________________________________________ http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=ht…

1 0

Re: [Inkscape-devel] layers
by bulia byak 11 Jun '04

11 Jun '04

> > * an object can be in zero or more layers > >Such concepts are better called groups or sets. >Can what you aim at be described as saved selections? Yes! I think it's exactly what it is - named selections. And from this viewpoint, the idea is useful, but it should NOT be coupled with visibility any more than it's coupled with z-order. It should be only concerned with saving and restoring selections (that possibly span layers or groups). And after you call it "named selection" and remove any attempts to tie it in with layer-like behavior, the idea of an object belonging to more than one named selection is perfectly legitimate. The UI might be simple: a "Name selection" command and an extra drop-down list in Find that lists all named selections in document. Or, even simpler, a single combo box on the selector top panel where you can type in the new name of your current selection, or select one of the defined names from a drop-down to reselect them. And the more I think about it, the more I like this idea. Saved selections can indeed be very useful. Mental, what do you think? _________________________________________________________________ MSN Premium helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=ht…

2 1

RE: [Inkscape-devel] layers
by bulia byak 11 Jun '04

11 Jun '04

The idea is attractively simple, but I see some problems: > * layer visibility is an Inkscape-specific thing, separate from CSS >visibility of individual objects That's problem #1. Remember that our SVG must render the same anywhere. If I hide a layer and save, I must not see that layer in Batik either. I don't see how you can achieve this, other than by manually adding SVG invisibility to all objects that are in an invisible layer (messy). Also: - I disagree that layers should not be related to z-order. A very useful operation (in a traditional vector editor) is re-z-ordering layers, which is not possible with your scheme - except if you select all objects in a layer and group them and move them up or down... which brings us back to the original scheme. - The notion of current layer is possible (just add the name of the current layer to all newly created objects), but again this disregards z-order which may be very inconvenient. For example if I work in a layer which is on top of "background" layer but under the "shades" layer, I expect all new objects to be created in between these layers as well. In your scheme, they're still added on top of all objects, which makes the entire layer thing less than useful. - The idea of an object belonging to more than one layer is cool, but the more I think of it the less I like it. I think it's just unclean and will give users lots of headaches (such as "Why hasn't this object disappeared when I hide its layer? Why do some objects in X disappear when I delete everything in Y?" etc) without significant advantages (or at least I don't see such advantages). When I want object X to be visible both with layer Y and with layer Z, I just put it in a third layer and name it accordingly and manipulate it as needed. I think it's saner that way. Or am I missing something? _________________________________________________________________ MSN Premium: Up to 11 personalized e-mail addresses and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=ht…

3 3

Re: [Inkscape-devel] layers
by Bob Jamison 10 Jun '04

10 Jun '04

Thorsten Wilms wrote: >Such concepts are better called groups or sets. >Can what you aim at be described as saved selections? > > > That might be a good model. The reason people keep saying "groups" is merely because the <g> tag is the mechanism that the SVG format gives us for things like this. Actually, z-layered groups was what I thought people were asking for when this idea was first mentioned. Just like Illustrator, Corel, even OpenOffice. Check out OO Draw, and see how they do it. A bit clumsy, but it works. It is definitely necessary at times in a drawing program to affix an image or other drawing in the background, sometimes ghosted, to provide a guide for drawing or tracing. This is something I could use myself, actually. Ok, back to my 4-day weekend. Bob

1 0