January 2007 - Inkscape Devel

Re: [Inkscape-devel] [Inkscape-user] Layers dropdown
by bulia byak 31 Jan '07

31 Jan '07

On 1/31/07, jiho <jo.irisson@...400...> wrote: > Inkscape could benefit from a similar approach, but it surely needs a > lot of thinking first. My humble opinion is that beginner vs. > advanced profiles won't work because one can be quite advanced in > some areas (eg node editing) and beginning in others (eg. color > management). Furthermore, a beginner and an advanced users > essentially have the same goals, it's just that the beginner does not > know how to achieve them and restraining them in a limited or a less > accessible functionality mode won't help them. In addition, as > someone already mentioned: how can one know when he is ready to > switch to advanced mode? Exactly my thoughts. > On the contrary, CAD/technical, diagramming, GIS, artistic, child > modes could be very efficient in exposing only the "right" features > to the user or exposing the same features differently. Indeed, > depending on which kind of work you do, your _goal_ is different and > the application can help you achieve it. Agreed. And as a first step towards this, let's make it easier for the user to make such "profiles" for himself. We really need a "Save as template" command which should be very easy to program based on the "Save a copy". All it has to do is just go to the templates directory in the save dialog, to save the user from wading there on his own (which is confusing and different on different platforms). Any takers? -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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pre2: drop-down lists in extensions on windows broken
by bulia byak 30 Jan '07

30 Jan '07

I cleared all previous installs and reinstalled pre2 on this winXP machine, but it does not help: in Effects > Generate from path > Pattern along path, the two drop-down lists are empty and cannot be opened. When I run the effect, I get Traceback (most recent call last): File "share\extensions\pathalongpath.py", line 264, in ? e.affect() File "C:\inkscape\share\extensions\inkex.py", line 157, in affect self.effect() File "share\extensions\pathalongpath.py", line 233, in effect if self.options.repeat: AttributeError: Values instance has no attribute 'repeat' Can anyone else confirm this? If it's real, it should be fixed before the release, since this is one of the major new features in 0.45. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Using Inkscape Canvas for your project
by Jon Phillips 30 Jan '07

30 Jan '07

<topPost /> Thanks for the reply Damon. I'm cc'ing the Inkscape development list, Bryce Harrington and Mental, two core developers working on this issue. More below... On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 16:07 +0000, Damon Chaplin wrote: > On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 15:37 -0800, Jon Phillips wrote: > > Message body follows: > > > > Hi, have you considered using Inkscape's canvas for your > > project (http://inkscape.org). We are trying to modularize > > our code more so that we can help other projects and get > > more contributors. Plus, we want the benefits of Cairo on > > our app. > > I wanted to create a new cairo-based canvas widget for GTK+ so > Inkscape's canvas wasn't really an option. > > Do you have a list of features of your canvas somewhere? Unfortunately not...plus, it is not modularized well-enough yet...hence we are seeking out if it could be of use to others, and to try and combine efforts on various parts of Inkscape. > Here's the list of GooCanvas Features: > > o Optional model/view split. > o Uses interfaces for items & views. > o Basic items - rect/ellipse/polyline/text/image/group. > o Path item, using SVG path specification strings. > o Embedded GTK+ widgets. > o Layers/stacking order with raise/lower functions. > o Cascading styles - line width/style/dashes, colors, fill patterns. > o Affine transformations for all items - rotations/scales/skews. > o Event handling - button/motion events, "pointer-events" property > like SVG. > o Grabs - support for pointer & keyboard grabs. > o Keyboard focus traversal. > o Accessibility (item title & description properties and hierarchy > stuff). > o Printing (output to a given cairo_t). > o Scrolling. > o Zooming. > o Item visibility setting - on/off/above zoom threshold. > o Simple animation. > o Scalable - support for thousands of items over a large canvas area. > o Support for different units - pixels/points/inches/millimeters. > o API docs. > o GooCanvasTable for layout of items (though this isn't in cvs yet). > > It is already pretty stable and mature (better than > GnomeCanvas/FooCanvas). Though the API is likely to change a little bit > more in future before stabilizing. > > I'd be interested to hear what things are needed for apps like Inkscape > that GooCanvas doesn't have. > > Damon This is quite impressive Damon. Bryce and Mental, what are your thoughts? Regardless if a collaboration happens or not, it is great to connect and get to know each other. Perhaps you would be interested in the upcoming libre graphics meeting conference in may 2007: http://lgm.scribus.net (temp site). Jon > -- Jon Phillips San Francisco, CA USA PH 510.499.0894 jon@...235... http://www.rejon.org MSN, AIM, Yahoo Chat: kidproto Jabber Chat: rejon@...896... IRC: rejon@...897...

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Illustrator Warp tools
by Aaron Spike 30 Jan '07

30 Jan '07

Alan Horkan wrote: >> I'd just like to point out, for the sake of others who might get a >> wrong idea from you, that Illustrator has no "warping nodes". > > Unfortunately your are not correct. > > The best I can manage at the moment is to show you this screenshot and try > to direct your attention to the very hard to find feature (see the hand > with a finger pointing down and beside it a box with a twirl coming out > the corner) > http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/illustrator/Adobe-Illustrator-CS/… > > (found a better link) >>From the middle to the left, see warp tool, and twirl > http://www.coe.fau.edu/abinder/handouts/Itools.htm > > These are taken from Adobe Illustrator CS verison 1 I just went out and fired up a copy of CS2 here at work. Alan, thank you for pointing this out! Finally something neat from illustrator. :-) This is a bit different than node sculpting. It doesn't require a node selection. There is a cursor with a center mark and an area delimited by a larger circle. As the user clicks and drags the paths are updated in real time. only the area within the larger circle is updated. And the amount of update seems to taper off toward the edge. There are various effects which can be applied to the current path. My take: we could do something like this by partially applying our non existent live effects to a path within an adjustable sphere of influence. Aaron Spike

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Using Inkscape's canvas code
by Jon Phillips 30 Jan '07

30 Jan '07

This is great Rick and libpapyrus-devel ppl. I'm cc'ing the Inkscape-devel list, Bryce Harrington and Mental, both core developers on Inkscape, as they can more adequately ask/answer questions. More below... On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 22:51 -0700, Rick L Vinyard Jr wrote: > Jon Phillips wrote: > > Message body follows: > > > > Hi, have you considered using Inkscape's canvas for your > > project (http://inkscape.org). > When I thought about restructuring glcanvasmm (an OpenGL based canvas) > as the cairo based (and then later cairomm based) papyrus I looked all > over for a library that would make it easy to do research in > diagrammatic reasoning... more specifically visual programming languages > (not Visual C++)... and even more specifically rule-based visual languages. > > I looked at GnomeCanvas, GnomeCanvasmm, Evas, DiaCanvas, Zinc, FooCanvas > (GooCanvas didn't exist then), et. al with the thought of just using the > library or writing a wrapper for the non-C++ libraries. I also looked at > several apps such as Dia, Inkscape, Sodipodi, et. al. with the thought > of extracting the drawing canvas. I even looked at pure vector drawing > libraries as well as 3D scenegraph libraries (such as Ogre and > OpenSceneGraph) that also had decent support for 2D primitives. > > Specifically, several things I was looking for: > * A standalone object-oriented C++ library with a minimalist set of > dependencies... to paraphrase Einstein... as few dependencies as > possible, but no fewer. > > * Easy to extend the canvas items either through inheritance or > through new drawing primitives > > * Easy to modify the behavior of objects in the canvas, either through > external controllers and events or through user interaction > > * Because of the above reasons, I really wanted something that > returned to Smalltalk's concept of a Model-View-Controller as separate > concepts > > So, I suppose to bring a long answer to your question to a conclusion... > yes, I did consider Inkscape's canvas but I really wanted something that > didn't tie the geometrical structure (model) to Gtk or the display (view > and controller), and at the time it looked like more work to extract the > canvas from Inkscape (or any of the other apps) and rewrite it as a > cairo based canvas, as opposed to rewriting glcanvasmm as a cairo based > canvas. > > But, I'm always open to either: > (1) Using sp_canvas if it makes sense > (2) Looking to sp_canvas as a model for improving the papyrus canvas Great! Ok, I hope we can work towards a model of collaboration. > With respect to (2), I know there are many aspects of the papyrus canvas > that are ripe for improvement. In particular, I've been looking for an > easy to use API first and speed second. That doesn't mean I'm not > concerned about speed... just that it is currently second in priority. This seems to be the same strategy for cairo. > > We are trying to modularize > > our code more so that we can help other projects and get > > more contributors. > That sounds great. I think there are many pieces of Inkscape that could > be reused all over the place if they were structured into libraries. Yes, we are working towards this. Maybe you could recommend pieces you would like that we could work to box up :) > > Plus, we want the benefits of Cairo on > > our app. > > > Which is a huge benefit. That's another reason for the separation > between papyrus and papyrusmm. Papyrus renderables only require a cairo > context to draw into, and thus only has a dependency on cairomm. Wow, cool! > Also, just browsing through the Inkscape repository, it looks like there > is a lot of duplicative effort between the Inkscape codebase and cairo. > For example: > > 88 void sp_curve_reset(SPCurve *curve); > 89 > 90 void sp_curve_moveto(SPCurve *curve, NR::Point const &p); > 91 void sp_curve_moveto(SPCurve *curve, gdouble x, gdouble y); > 92 void sp_curve_lineto(SPCurve *curve, NR::Point const &p); > 93 void sp_curve_lineto(SPCurve *curve, gdouble x, gdouble y); > 94 void sp_curve_lineto_moving(SPCurve *curve, gdouble x, gdouble y); > 95 void sp_curve_curveto(SPCurve *curve, NR::Point const &p0, NR::Point const &p1, NR::Point const &p2); > 96 void sp_curve_curveto(SPCurve *curve, gdouble x0, gdouble y0, gdouble x1, gdouble y1, gdouble x2, gdouble y2); > 97 void sp_curve_closepath(SPCurve *curve); > 98 void sp_curve_closepath_current(SPCurve *curve); > > From a cursory scan it looks like these and other methods could be > eliminated by moving to cairo. And, if there is some optimization you > have that cairo doesn't, I'm sure Carl would gladly accept patches. Yes, agree. He sits in our channel all the time, so we are all buddies :) > > If you get a chance, please check out sp-canvas.cpp which is > > our main canvas code. It works really well: > > > > http://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/inkscape/inkscape/trunk/src/disp… > > > I have... along with many of the canvas items as well. There are some > great things there. > > > Also, please forward this onto your project list so others > > can see. > Not a problem. Great Rick, lets keep the dialogue happening and hopefully great collaboration we can aim towards :) Jon > --- > > Rick > -- Jon Phillips San Francisco, CA USA PH 510.499.0894 jon@...235... http://www.rejon.org MSN, AIM, Yahoo Chat: kidproto Jabber Chat: rejon@...896... IRC: rejon@...897...

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] [Inkscape-user] Baffling UI
by Bryce Harrington 29 Jan '07

29 Jan '07

On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 11:52:09PM +0100, Olivier Lefevre wrote: > Thanks for the explanations. So if I create the rectangle and > immediately switch to the select tool yes I get to see its properties > and change them. It did not occur to me to try the selector because the > object seemed to have disappeared as soon as I clicked elsewhere. I'll > be damned if I know why it was white: I have _viewed_ some SVG documents > in Inkscape before but this is my first stab at creating one. > > In the status bar I would suggest not using F and S but spelling out > Fill and Stroke in full: there is enough space for that and if you are a > newcomer and both F and S say "N/A" it is not obvious what they refer > to. Besides it seems weird for the stroke to be N/A: I can understand Would it perhaps be clearer to get rid of the labels entirely and just show a rectangle or other shape in the fill color, with a border in the stroke color (if any)? Then we could eliminate the need to localize at all, which could be beneficial in languages where the translation for 'fill' or 'stroke' may end up being a longer word. Bryce > having no fill but how can an object have neither fill nor stroke yet > still somehow exist? As per your own message, shouldn't the stroke have > been white or transparent and not N/A? White is definitely a color and > in most editing tools transparent _is_ a color, too, albeit obviously a > peculiar one. > > > Inkscape is not a viewer. Its primary function is editing. Therefore, > > plain arrow keys are reserved for the most basic editing action: > > OK. > > -- O.L.

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Crash bugs
by bulia byak 29 Jan '07

29 Jan '07

1. I rather think this bug needs to be fixed before 0.45: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=604306&aid=1638735&group_… 2. This one is also very nasty (crashes without autosave!) but it needs a change in internal APIs to be fixed properly: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=604306&aid=1594526&group_… so I added it to Known Problems for now: http://wiki.inkscape.org:8080/wiki/index.php/ReleaseNotes045#Do_not_use_a_c… -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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Crash with bitmap font
by unknown＠example.com 29 Jan '07

29 Jan '07

I have found that inkscape crashes when opening file dialog (File->Open, Save, ...) if sans-serif font is a bitmap font. I did tests with freetype 2.2.[01], fontconfig 2.4.2, pango 1.15.5 and inkscape 4.43 and svn, but this is old bug. I have tracked down using gdb that this happens when application calls 'pango_ft2_font_get_face(pFont)' in function 'font_instance::InitTheFace()' in file 'src/libnrtype/FontInstance.cpp'. This happens not every time but only with bad 'pFont' parameter, so application can start but crashes with 'internal error' when opening file dialog. It doesn't write to console anything usefull. To test this, in file '~/.fonts.conf' add <alias> <family>sans-serif</family> <prefer> <family>Helvetica</family> </prefer> </alias> in '<fontconfig></fontconfig>' section (and chech that 'fc-match sans' says 'Helvetiva').

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Help
by fedemil＠...92... 29 Jan '07

29 Jan '07

Hello, my name is Federico Miliacca and I'm a student of engineering at the University of Roma "La Sapienza" in Italy. I'm to leading a bachelor thesis about the Animated Vectorial Graphics under INKSCAPE. I would have to realize a module that modernizes in real time the color of the edge and the background of the present objects on the canvas of job. The objects will have to be simple rectangles or circles. In the days it passes I have analyzed to the code source and I have characterized many interesting rows (repr-io.cpp - attribute-record.h - share.cpp - etc) in order to understand as INKSCAPE manages the rescue of the objects and to understand here like capturing the same objects from the memory. I asked if you could kindly clear to me as INKSCAPE represents the objects in memory and which rows are use you for this rapresentation. Then I would want to know what you can advise to me in order to realize this module that must read to the label of an object or its id and modify edge and background reading the data from a DBMS. Thanks all you for the aid that me give, if succeed to resolve this my doubt, can continue with the my thesis and complete the my course of bachelor. Sincerely yours Federico Miliacca Naviga e telefona senza limiti con Tiscali Scopri le promozioni Tiscali adsl: navighi e telefoni senza canone Telecom http://abbonati.tiscali.it/adsl/

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unclumping
by Romain Thouvenin 29 Jan '07

29 Jan '07

Hello, I'm Romain, born in France. I'd like to contribute to this great project, so I just subscribed to translator and devel (I study computer science), and started working :) I am working on translating fuzzy messages, and I found the message "Unclump tiled clones". I figured out that it was the message corresponding to undo pressing the "Unclump" button when making tiled clones. But when I try this button, the clones become closer and closer, that's quite different from "spreading out", isn't it ? Did I miss something or is it a mistake in the implementation of the unclumping process ? Maybe I didn't understand what clumping is ? Thanks for your help, Romain

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