- Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

#inkscape-user-support channel
by Vladimir Savic 27 Aug '07

27 Aug '07

There are many users that come on #inkscape irc channel to ask user questions. Wouldn't it be more appropriate to open another channel for user questions? That way we (users) will not bother developers if they don't want to be disturbed. And questions will be more on-topic that way. We can then track down frequent FAQ and move them to inkscape wiki. Of course providing basic informations to newly appeared users where to find documentation - like wiki, address of faq, location of keybindings file etc. Thanx in advance, Vlada

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Slower snapping between 0.45 and devel
by jiho 27 Aug '07

27 Aug '07

Hello everyone, I noticed a non negligible difference in responsiveness between Inkscape 0.45 and current devel version on a "complex" (4000 objects) drawing... in the wrong way unfortunately (current devel is slower than 0.45). Since disabling snapping altogether in devel remedies to the slowness I think it involves snapping. I tried to test both version with the same parameters and selected these options (and only these): 0.45 snap nodes to objects snap to objects paths snap sensitivity 10 devel snap nodes snap to paths snap sensitivity 10 And the devel version is still slower than the released version. In fact it will hang for a little while (like 1-2 sec with 100% CPU usage) before first moving the objects, subsequent movements being a little bit faster (but still slower than 0.45). Here is the file on which I remarked it, for you to test: http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/slowSnapper.svg try selecting the text objects at the bottom and moving them for example. Since I know the snapping code is begin worked on now, I thought I would report this. Thanks in advance for any improvements. Cheers, JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/

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NEW: four more modes in Tweak tool
by bulia byak 27 Aug '07

27 Aug '07

Of the four new modes, two are for editing path shapes (Attract and Repel) and two are for coloring objects (Color Paint and Color Jitter) . I also renamed Melt to Shrink and Inflate to Grow as discussed before. * The Attract and Repel modes work by moving each affected point on a path towards (Attract) or from (Repel) the cursor point. In some cases this may look similar to Shrink and Grow, but the difference is that shrinking/growing moves paths perpendicularly to the path in each point, whereas attracting/repelling moves them to or from the cursor regardless of the path shape. These modes are similar to the Pinch effect in ; you can use them for various central-symmetric distortions in parts of your paths. Color-changing modes The Color Paint and Color Jitter modes, unlike the path editing modes, change the colors of objects instead of their shapes. Yet they share enough common features with the path-changing modes to be part of the same tool: These modes also use a circular soft-edged brush controlled by the Width and Force parameters on the Controls bar and affected by the pen pressure (if you have a pressure-sensitive tablet). * Color Paint applies the style of the tool to the selected objects under the brush. The style of the tool is visible in the style swatch at the rightmost end of the tool's control bar; it can be changed by clicking on the color palette or by any other style assignment command, such as Fill and Stroke dialog. (Note: unlike all other tools, in Tweak tool in Color Paint mode you cannot assign style directly to selected objects; any style-setting command changes the tool's style instead.) The fill from the tool's style applies to the fills of the painted objects, and the stroke applies to the strokes. If the tool's style has no fill or no stroke, it won't affect fills or strokes, correspondingly. For example, if you want to color the fills of objects blue but leave their strokes untouched, assign blue fill to the tool's style (just click blue on the palette) but set its stroke to None (middle-click the Stroke swatch in the statusbar). Similarly, master opacity in the tool's style This mode allows you to literally paint over objects, shifting their colors towards the target style of the tool. For example, if you paint with yellow fill over a blue-filled object, the object will become greenish blue, then green, then yellowish green, and end up being exactly the green color you're painting with. This speed of this gradual transition depends on the Force and pen pressure; also, objects touched by the periphery of the brush are less affected than those hit by the brush center. Overall, using this tool is very similar to a soft brush in a raster editor such as Gimp or Photoshop. * Color Jitter mode does not apply any color, but instead jitters (randomizes) the colors of the objects it touches. The force of the action determines how strong is the randomization, i.e. how far the colors deviate from the original values. This mode does not use the tool's style. Both modes work on flat fills and gradients; for gradients, the tool takes into account not only the position of the entire object with gradient, but also the position of each gradient stop relative to the brush. This means that, for example, you can change the blue color only in an object filled with blue-red gradient simply by painting over its blue end with a brush small enough to not touch the red. Channels Color Paint and Color Jitter honor the Channels control. This control comprises the four buttons: H, S, L, and O, which allow you to turn on and off the tool's action on the object's hue, saturation, lightness, and opacity, correspondingly. For example, if you want to raise the saturation of some part of your drawing without changing the hue, select some maximum-saturation color (e.g. pure red) and turn off all Channels buttons except S. Similarly, you can replace the hues without affecting saturation or lightness (only H pressed), or lighten/darken all colors without changing their hues and saturation (only L pressed). Pressing O allows you to apply the master opacity from the tool's style to the master opacity of objects (but not fill or stroke opacity). Usage notes Color painting with Tweak tool is similar, but not exactly analogous to bitmap painting. Even though the tool itself works as a soft brush, it still applies its color to vector objects, which behave as vector objects usually do. For example, if you want to change the tint of the face in your drawing, and if a hand in the drawing is part of the same object as the face, that hand will change its tint too even if it's located far from the point you are painting. (We foresee a "fracture" command in one of the next versions of Inkscape which will help you turn a monolithic object into a mosaic of small fragments that will be then easy to paint with Tweak tool.) Still, even with this limitation, color painting is a novel way of dealing with vector drawings which allows you to quickly and intuitively make adjustments which would be awkward and slow with traditional approach. Drawings containing patterns or scatterings of small independent objects are best suited for color painting with Tweak tool. Examples include: * freehand drawings with Calligraphy pen, consisting of many separate strokes; * gradient meshes imported from Adobe Illustrator files (Inkscape renders these meshes as lattices of small polygons; while there's no direct support for gradient meshes in Inkscape yet, color painting on such lattices is almost as good); * text converted to paths and with Break Apart command applied so that each letter is a separate path; * patterns made with the Tile Clones command; note that you need to unset the fill and/or stroke on the original object and use the Color tab to assign some initial color to the clones - this will make them paintable with the Tweak tool without unlinking. Moreover, color tweaking can be useful for compositions with a few objects or even for single objects. Unlike all other color selection methods, painting with the Tweak tool implements the color mixing metaphor which is much more familiar to traditional artists than RGB sliders or even the color wheel. For example, start with a rectagle of pure blue color; then, pick different colors by Color Paint and apply light touches with minimum Force and minimum pen pressure: add a little green, a little brown, a little yellow, etc. until you have the exact hue you need. Similarly, you can whiten or blacken any hue by admixing white or black. You can also use color tweaking to add a tint, darken/lighten, saturate/desaturate, or color jitter your entire drawing. Just select all in all layers, zoom out, choose a large brush width so it covers all of the drawing, and apply a little color tweaking (with minimum Force) that will therefore affect all visible objects. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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Alt-mouse
by Thomas Worthington 27 Aug '07

27 Aug '07

An awful lot of Inkscape's functions (I notice that the new touch selection is another one) seem to be relying on the alt-key being held down and various things done with the mouse. To say that this is a pain under Linux is an understatement since alt-mouse is used by window managers to allow quick manipulation of window sizes and positions, which is vital on large screens. Given that Inkscape is only one app and alt-mouse is effectively in use by every other app on the system for something else, is there any easy way to change these shortcuts to something like meta-mouse or something (anything!) else? Is it the case that most Inkscape developers are using Windows and are simply not aware of how difficult these alt-mouse shortcuts make it for Linux users? Thomas Worthington

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LPE crashes
by lapnect 26 Aug '07

26 Aug '07

I have just played with LPE and I found two ways to crash Inkscape (current SVN trunk). The first way: - draw circle - do *not* convert it to path - select that circle and copy it (ctrl+c) - draw line using freehand tool and select it - press ctrl+shift+7 - press 'Apply' - click on 'Paste' icon The second way: - draw circle - convert it to path - select that circle and copy it (ctrl+c) - draw line using freehand tool and select it - press ctrl+shift+7 - press 'Apply' - click on 'Paste' icon - press ctrl+z (undo) Hope it will be helpful :) -- lapnect

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Fwd: SSnapping (AutoCAD way)
by Joshua Blocher 26 Aug '07

26 Aug '07

I havn't had the chance to watch the video yet, but would something like snap targets work. Let me explain. Targets would be a symbol that appear on viable snap positions I imagine it as a bullseye that appear as soon as you start dragging a node.When you get near a target the it changes from red to green to indicate where its snapping to probably not the best colors for colorblind people but you get the idea. You even as far as different shapes for different snap types. Small coloured squares/dots for grid snaps. Bullseye/circle coloured for nodes I'm not sure to do for line maybe just highlight it. and of course since this is inkscape an option or key combo to toggle them on and off. Joshua L. Blocher verbalshadow On 8/26/07, Jed Frechette <jedfrechette@...400...> wrote: > On Friday 24 August 2007 1:33 pm, Diederik van Lierop wrote: > > The object snapper in ACAD is a bit different: if only snaps after > > clicking the left mousebutton; this way ACAD can show what point will > > be snapped to before doing the actual snapping. Inkscape however snaps > > instantly while dragging: it cannot show what it will snap to, because > > it already has snapped by that time. The only thing we could do is show > > afterwards where it has snapped, which is only useful in cases where > > this is not immediately obvious. For example in selections with a large > > number of nodes, nodes being very close to each other, or at low > > snapping sensitivity. > > Good point, but I still think an on canvas "post"-snap indicator could be > useful. I seem to run in to the non-obvious corner cases pretty regularly. Is > my node snapping to the path or a node on the path? Is the upper left corner > of the bounding box snapping to something on the edge of my drawing or is the > invisible center of rotation snapping to something else? etc. Sometimes I > have no clue what is being snapped to. I suspect bugs in in these cases but I > haven't been sure how to debug them, if anyone has any hints I would be glad > to followup. > > In practice, whenever I'm using snap heavily I simply keep the snap dialog > open and constantly adjust the settings to get what I want. I suspect I would > still need to do this even with a snap indicator but hopefully to a lesser > extent. Of course, I don't know how typical my usage is and unfortunately I > don't have any time to look at the code myself so take my opinions for what > they are worth. > > Best, > > -- > Jed Frechette > http://jdfrechette.alturl.com > > 3722 Dead, 27186 Wounded > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. > Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. > Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. > Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ > _______________________________________________ > Inkscape-devel mailing list > Inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel >

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Improvements in filtering framework
by Niko Kiirala 25 Aug '07

25 Aug '07

I committed (actually a week ago) some improvements in filtering framework. The main part of this improvement is the new NR::FilterUnits class, which provides tools for handling different coordinate systems in filters. Another big part is moving code for preparing pixblocks from NR::Filter to NR::FilterSlot, where it more conveniently belongs. This means, that now all pixblocks a filter primitive can receive are in same coordinate system. (this fixes bug #1768003) Filter primitives can affect, what this coordinate system is, by overriding the get_input_traits function. Example from gaussian blur: FilterTraits FilterGaussian::get_input_traits() { return TRAIT_PARALLER; } At the moment, the only other possibility is TRAIT_ANYTHING, which is the default, and specifies that filter doesn't care, what the coordinate system is like. (feBlend and feComposite are like this, for example) TRAIT_PARALLER means, that x- and y-axis of the object must be paraller to x- and y-axis of the input image. For example, feGaussianBlur requires this, as the deviation is specified along object x- and y-axis. Only FilterGaussian has this implemented now, it should be implemented in other filters, that need it. I made it use bitfields and called it traits, because I think that this can have a wider use. For example, many filters need 32-bit RGBA images with premultiplied alpha as inputs. We could specify this as trait and move the handling code from the filter primitives to FilterSlot. Also, I'm thinking, that Filter::render and FilterPrimitive::render should be changed to take FilterUnits as an input instead of Matrix. This would give these functions more tools to figure out, where things should be placed, how large the affected area should be, where the bounding box corners are etc. Helper functions for calculating distances, transforming points from user coordinates to image coordinates etc. can also be added to FilterUnits, so that they don't need to be implemented in filter primitives. -- Niko Kiirala

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Tango Icons
by Ryan Lerch 25 Aug '07

25 Aug '07

I was reading the release notes for the upcoming GIMP release (http://gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.4.html ), and I noticed that they are updating their icon set to one that adheres to the tango guidelines. I was wondering what everyone thinks about using the inkscape tango icons set(http://gnomelook.org/content/show.php/Tangofied+inkscape+icons+set?conte nt=48140 ) as default. I know that the current revision of this icon set is incomplete in some parts (eg: Tweak and Bucket Fill.) Just thought I would throw the idea out there. Cheers, ryanlerch

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Time to start thinking about a release?
by john cliff 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

Hi Guys, Just thought with the SoC over it might be a good time to start thinking about release schedules again, or at least discussing them. Seems like a lot of fun stuff in the SVN build that people want to get their hands on and with the SoC deadline past locking down HEAD shouldnt be as much of an issue. Anyone got something their in the middle of that would be worth waiting for? Any passionate fors or againsts? lets hear what y'all think... Cheers Sim

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Gradients and Pattern Libraries
by ryan lerch 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

After a discussion in the IRC channel about gradients and patterns, i have a few queries about them: 1. Do the inkscape/share/patterns and inkscape/share/gradients actually do anything in Inkscape yet? 2. Is there anyone planning to create code for a gradients or pattern library in inkscape, so they can be browsed and imported into the current document. 3. What would be the format for keeping, say gradients in a library? cheers, ryanlerch

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lib2geom python binding
by joel＠...1709... 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

Question: are there any plans to make a python lib2geom interface? I've had a really nifty idea for an extension, but it requires bezier curves to be loaded from stock SVG files, and then I need to be able to solve the beziers in X for a given Y coordinate. [can lib2geom even do this?]

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] [Inkscape-user] exporting slices as boxes
by bulia byak 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

On 8/17/07, Aaron Spike <aaron@...749...> wrote: > It would be more convenient and require less mental effort for the user > if they could see them. It helps to be able to see all of the boxes, not > just the selected box, while creating new boxes. You can. Just select all and then draw with Rect tool. It will even snap to the existing rects. (It will unselect all but the new one once you finish it, though.) > there is a simple solution. I can select all the boxes and give them > color while I am working with them. But again this is only a work > around. Everything can be called workaround for something else. For example, if we implement your "magic slices" and I want to change their color, I will most likely have to go and search for that in prefs. Which, for me, is a poor workaround for just selecting the boxes I need and clicking on the color palette. > And it require effort from a user to do something that we should > provide a real solution for. No solution is "real". One may be better than another but it does not make it more "real" in any sense. A specialized solution may be more convenient, but it may also be more clumsy and getting-in-the-way of those who don't need it. See, a new specialized feature is worth it if it offers something which is _in principle_ impossible or very hard to do with existing tools. And even if it has some added value, that feature better be very isolated and orthogonal to everything else. Otherwise, if it's instrusive, it must provide some really basic and important facility in order to be considered. The slicing facility is important for many people, check. But doing it via "magic slices" is very intrusive and non-orthogonal because it involves a whole new kind of objects and/or controls that all tools will need to be aware of - no check. And it also does not offer much added value compared to the naive approach, except some conveniences that may be just as well incorporated into existing tools/templates/dialogs - also no check. That's why it does not pass my filter. > > Yes, but this is just one of the dozens of selection methods available > > in Inkscape. Most other methods work fine. > > Could you please list the "dozens" of selection methods? I know we > provide quite a number, perhaps even 12 but I think you may be > exaggerating. OK, granted, "dozens" was an exaggeration :) But you can get 12 if you count all the keyboard modifiers in selector :) > Now, of all of the selection methods that Inkscape > provides, what would you say is the simplest, most obvious method for > selecting a single object. I argue that it is the single click of the > selector tool. Yes, but you forget another proposed method that you can use if you don't like transparent rects: make them blue, but place them in a semitransparent layer. Then when you need to export it, just set its transparency to 0. Minimum clicks to get what you need, and you can still click to select the slices. What's wrong with this? Difficult to set up? Just provide a template with that semitransparent "slices" layer already present. Difficult to discover? Write and popularize a tutorial. Cannot batch export the slices? Yes you can, in SVN this is added right to the Export dialog (the "export selected objects separately" checkbox). I can even easily add another checkbox there: export all within the object's bbox but not the object itself - and then you will not need to make the boxes transparent, because they will be hidden in the export anyway. Or, we can eventually support per-layer Outline view (this was already requested by other people for other purposes), which, if enabled for the export layer, will solve all of your problems at once: rects will be always visible and clickable even if transparent. And we can even enable per-layer outline color to differentiate them visually. Need more intuitive manipulation of the slices? Excellent suggestion, just implement the rect-specific commands for "subdivide horizontally", "subdivide vertically", and "rectangle union" on the Rect toolbar, and fix the KnotHolder so it can edit more than one selected rect (e.g. by dragging the touching sides of two adjacent rects) - and editing the slices will be a breeze, not to mention all the other benefits you get from these improvements. See? Every convenience you can think of is easily possible with the simple approach, just by extending the capabilities of existing tools. And the big advantage is that these extensions may be useful in various other situations too. Whereas, if you create a specialized tool just for slicing, it will be useless for anything but slicing. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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Calligraphy width - can you guess what I'm going to say? :)
by microUgly 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

I did a search for this because I thought it would have been brought up many times - but I couldn't find anything. I don't understand the benefit of width not being effected by zoom with the calligraphy tool. The Inkscape.org tutorial justifies it by saying: "This makes sense, because the natural "unit of measure" in calligraphy is the range of your hand's movement, and it is therefore convenient to have the width of your pen nib in constant ratio to the size of your "drawing board"" I could understand this if the calligraphy tool was only ever used for calligraphy writing. But I would think it's as likely, if not more likely, to be used as a drawing tool. And as a drawing tool this feature is very frustrating. To ensure consistent thickness lines when inking you have to manually calculate the width everytime you change zoom. Otherwise you end up with a mixture of very thick and very thin lines. Perhaps to not upset traditional calligraphy artists, is it possible we could get a checkbox to toggle how the width is effected when zooming? Even if the feature simply adjusted the value in width field as you zoomed in and out. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Calligraphy-width---can-you-guess-what-I%27m-going-to… Sent from the Inkscape - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Time to start thinking about a release?
by joel＠...1709... 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

> PDF does not support blur, let alone PS. The only workaround you have is to convert blur to bitmap before exporting. I think inkscape needs a pre-flight dialog then which gives you errors, warnings and messages concerning your export, otherwise the inexperianced user will struggle to understand why blur failed to export, much less how they can get around the issue. CorelDRAW has a rather nice example of a pre-flight dialog for printing. ---------------------------------------- From: "bulia byak" <buliabyak@...400...> Sent: 23 August 2007 23:51 To: "Adib Taraben" <taraben.a@...1512...> Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Time to start thinking about a release? On 8/23/07, Adib Taraben wrote: > also we need to mark the things that _have to_ go into the release. > I do a lot of technical drawings and for me it is absolutely necessary > to include the blur into the pdf and ps export formats. PDF does not support blur, let alone PS. The only workaround you have is to convert blur to bitmap before exporting. We may eventually add an option to do this automatically but I don't think it's particularly high priority because the workaround is easy (just press Alt+B). -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] inkscape and scim
by Gerrit Sangel 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

I just tried it on Windows and there's the same problem... Hm... maybe it is just a gtk issue. I think I'll investigate this further on the gtk mailinglist. But I wonder why this works with Firefox without any problems. And Gimp has more or less a mixture of it. It does not work the same way as with my German keyboard, but it is not so annoying as with inkscape or scim. But this problem is really annoying. Almost unusable. Luckily, usually you don't have to enter long texts in inkscape, but in Abiword it's the same problem and really really annoying there. Gerrit Am Mittwoch 22 August 2007 schrieben Sie: > (The list seems to reject me so I'll send direct) > > The scim issues are known, and not limited to scim. I reported this on > Windows about two years ago. See > http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1223602&group_id=9 >3438&atid=604306 > > James

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Tango Icons
by joel＠...1709... 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

I completely agree. That Tango icons look much better. ---------------------------------------- From: David Christian Berg <david@...407...> Sent: 24 August 2007 00:37 To: Ryan Lerch <ryanlerch@...400...> Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Tango Icons Definitely it should be used. I'm using it since a while and I'm totally contend. just my 2 ¢ David On Fri, 2007-08-24 at 08:15 +1000, Ryan Lerch wrote: > I was reading the release notes for the upcoming GIMP release > (http://gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.4.html ), and I noticed that > they are updating their icon set to one that adheres to the tango > guidelines. I was wondering what everyone thinks about using the > inkscape tango icons > set(http://gnomelook.org/content/show.php/Tangofied+inkscape+icons > +set?content=48140 ) as default. > > > > I know that the current revision of this icon set is incomplete in > some parts (eg: Tweak and Bucket Fill.) > > > > Just thought I would throw the idea out there. > > > > Cheers, > > > > ryanlerch > > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. > Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. > Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. > Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ > _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel

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[Fwd: [Scale-announce] So Cal Linux Expo Announces Call For Papers]
by Ted Gould 24 Aug '07

24 Aug '07

Historically Inkscape has had a pretty large presence at SCALE, I imagine we will this year as well. One thing that I'd like to see is more Inkscape speakers and free graphics in general. Heck, I'd love to see enough submissions for a free graphics track! :) The CFP is until the end of November, so there is time. Start to think about what you can present! --Ted -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: SCALE Announcements <scale-announce@...1782...> Reply-To: nobody@...1782... To: SCALE-announce <scale-announce@...1566...> Subject: [Scale-announce] So Cal Linux Expo Announces Call For Papers Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:47:04 -0700 July 26th, 2007 The Linux Expo of Southern California has opened the Call For Papers for the 6th Annual Southern California Linux Expo, to be held February 8th, 9th, & 10th, 2008. As with SCALE 5x, S6x will be held at the Westin Hotel at Los Angeles International Airport. If you’re interested in speaking at SCALE, don’t wait to submit your proposal. Over their last couple of events, the Linux Expo has had many more applications than they have had speaker slots available. See http://socallinuxexpo.com/scale6x/documents/scale6x-cfp.pdf for details on how to apply for a speaking opportunity at SCALE. Likewise, if you know someone who has something interesting to say about Open Source software, pass along the CFP to them and encourage them to apply. _______________________________________________ Scale-announce mailing list Scale-announce@...1783... http://mail.socallinuxexpo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scale-announce

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Import from OCAL feature
by Bruno Dilly 23 Aug '07

23 Aug '07

Hi people, I implemented a new feature: import from open clip art library. When you have some time (and if you have interest), take a look on this and give me some feedback. Thanks

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wiki broken
by bulia byak 23 Aug '07

23 Aug '07

I get the following when trying to save a page on wiki. Logging out didn't help, now I can't log back in with the same error: While trying to retrieve the URL: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php? The following error was encountered: * Access Denied. Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is incorrect. Your cache administrator is root. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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NEW: Tweak tool
by bulia byak 23 Aug '07

23 Aug '07

As discussed before, I moved the thinning/thickening functionality into a tool of its own, added two more modes and some controls. For one thing, you don't need Alt anymore :) Attention lib2geom hackers: please consider this a challenge! Can you switch this to using your new lib instead of livarot? Livarot sucks big time with regard to performance and memory leaking (see Known Problems below), and working with it involves way too much black magic which I don't like. What is needed is simple: convert a path to a polygon with a given tolerance, move the points of the polygon according to some simple algorithm, and convert the result back to path with some simplification. If someone switches this to lib2geom and it works good, I will consider adding more modes. Otherwise, I'm afraid I may have to remove the Roughen mode before the release because it's really not working reliably enough (often locks the path with the "directed eulerian" warning, caused by too small subpaths). Now for the official announcement: Tweak tool The Tweak tool is an exciting new way to edit paths. Unlike the Node tool, you don't need to worry about where the nodes of a path are and how to manipulate them to obtain the shape you want. Instead, you just act on any part of a path using the tool's "brush" in order to bend, twist, or stretch that part, and the path will respond smoothly and naturally regardless of where its nodes lie. While not very useful for technical applications such as schemes or diagrams, this tool will be indispensable for artistic uses of Inkscape - cartoons, drawings, sketches, anime, etc. This new functionality is somewhat similar to the "Pucker", "Bloat", and other similar tools in the latest versions of Adobe Illustrator, except that in Inkscape it works softer and is easier to control. The area of the tool's action (its "brush") is visualized as an orange-colored circular outline centered at your mouse pointer. However, that area actually has no sharp boundaries; the power of the tool's action falls off gradually, following a smooth bell-shaped profile. This makes the tool act softly and smoothly, and the paths respond as if they are made of soft jelly. The tool will work on any number of selected objects; for example, you can select all (Ctrl+A) and "smear" your entire drawing by Push. If applied to a shape or text, the tool converts them to paths automatically. You can also apply it to groups of objects. If you're trying to use it without anything selected, it will remind you to select some objects by a statusbar message. Width The width of the tool's brush can be changed by the Width control in the tool's controls bar above the canvas (in the range from 1 to 100). You can also change width by Left and Right arrow keys (same as in the Calligraphy tool) at any time (including during action). Also like in Calligraphy tool, the visible width of the brush is independent of zoom; simply zooming in or out is often easier than adjusting the width if you want to cover a smaller or larger area of the drawing. Force The next control is Force which adjusts the power of the action (in the range from 1 to 100). You can also change width by Up and Down arrow keys at any time (including during action). Think of it as the force of pressure you apply to the paths you tweak. If you have a pressure-sensitive tablet and the "Use pressure" button on the right-hand end of the controls bar is on, then the force will also depend on how hard you actually press your pen into your tablet, varying in the range from zero to whatever you set in the Force control. If all you have is a mouse, then the force will be constant but still settable by the Force control. The force of the effect also depends on zoom (or in other words, it stays the same when measured by screen pixels, same as when you move and object by Alt+arrow keys). Fidelity Any tweaking of a path slightly distorts the entire path, including even those parts that you didn't touch. These distortions are similar to those that a Simplify command produces. The Fidelity value (also in the range from 1 to 100, default is 50) allows you to control the amount of these distortions. With a higher fidelity, the distortions are less noticeable, but the path may end up having a lot of nodes which blows up the SVG size and slows down Inkscape. The best value of Fidelity depends on the nature of your artwork. If you're sculpting an amorphous blob, you can do with low fidelity of about 20. If, however, you are pushing or blowing a text string (as a single path) and want the letters outside the distorted area to remain crisp and clean, you will need to raise fidelity to 80 or more. Modes There are currently four modes in the Tweak tool: Push, Melt, Blow, and Roughen. * This default mode of the tool, Push, simply displaces the part of the path under the cursor in the direction of the drag. The path behaves like soft jelly, bending and bulging smoothly and naturally. It's an easy way to produce various irregular, lifelike, handmade-looking shapes starting from something as simple as an ellipse or a calligraphic stroke. For parallel-stroke hatching (engraving) done in the Calligraphy tool, pushing is an easy way to bend, pinch, or curve the entire hatching uniformly. * The Melt and Blow are two opposite modes that move each point of a path in a direction perpendicular to the path's surface at the point, either inwards (Melt) or outwards (Blow). This is similar to the Inset and Outset commands, except that the Tweak tool can act on a part of a path instead of the whole path. For example, the visible lightness/darkness of an engraving hatching may not exactly correspond to your artistic intention. Also, the ends of strokes are often far from ideal - they may be too blunt or have unsightly bends or blobs. This is where the Tweak tool may help. Select all the strokes in a hatching pattern and apply a light Melt action where you want the lines to become thinner (and the hatching to become lighter), up until total disappearance. If you press hard, melting works as an eraser, so you can easily clean the strokes' ends in a hatching to making them thin, sharp, and uniform. Conversely, applying Blow makes strokes wider (i.e. the hatching becomes darker). Of course, melting and blowing are useful not only for calligraphic strokes. Same as with Push, with Melt and Blow you can sculpt any path, spawning smooth treacle-like appendages with Blowing and carving holes with Melting. Unlike the "node sculpting" mode in the Node tool, however, this does not require adding new nodes, selecting any nodes, or even being aware of nodes at all. * The Roughen mode does exactly this: roughens the edge of the path without changing its overall shape. Slight roughening simply makes the edge crooked and uneven; strong roughening tears and explodes the edge into random blobs and splotches. Note that this operation, especially with high Fidelity, adds a lot of nodes which increases the size of your SVG document and may slow down Inkscape considerably. In particular, pushing/melting/blowing of a roughened path becomes much slower and more difficult, so it's recommended to finalize the overall shape of a path first and roughen it, if necessary, only as the final step. Keyboard shortcuts * W, Alt+F2: switch to the Tweak tool * Shift+P: switch to the Push mode * Shift+M: switch to the Melt mode * Shift+B: switch to the Blow mode * Shift+R: switch to the Roughen mode * Left, Right: change width * Up, Down: change force * mouse drag: act on selected path in the current mode * Ctrl+mouse drag: temporarily switch to Melt (while Ctrl is down) * Shift+Ctrl+mouse drag: temporarily switch to Blow (while Shift+Ctrl is down) Known problems Known problems with the Tweak tool: 1. it is rather slow; 2. it quickly eats memory; and 3. it is sometimes buggy - thin calligraphic strokes may suddenly disappear or change their shape drastically as you're melting or blowing them. For (3), it helps to increase Fidelity. Also, you can undo the bad change and try again with less pressure on the pen - if you do your thinning in several light touches instead of one heavy press, usually you will be able to get the desired result without the buggy behavior. Also, sometimes after roughening, further tweaking of a path becomes impossible with this diagnostic: WARNING **: Shape error in ConvertToShape: directedEulerian(a) == false All these problems stem from the livarot library that we use for geometric manipulation of paths. Fortunately, livarot is scheduled for replacement by lib2geom, a new library now in development, so hopefully these issues will be addressed then. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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Unable to read keys file /usr/local/share/inkscape/keys/default.xml
by Diederik van Lierop 22 Aug '07

22 Aug '07

Hi, When starting the latest and greatest Inkscape (compiled from SVN) I get this: ** (inkscape:6280): CRITICAL **: Inkscape::XML::Document* sp_repr_read_file(const gchar*, const gchar*): assertion `Inkscape::IO::file_test( filename, G_FILE_TEST_EXISTS )' failed ** (inkscape:6280): WARNING **: Unable to read keys file /usr/local/share/inkscape/keys/default.xml My keys are located however in /home/diedenrezi/eclipse_workspace/trunk/share/keys/default.xml What's causing this? I've recently reinstalled Fedora on my pc; did I configure something incorrectly? I've got v0.45.1 from the Red Hat repos installed in parallel, are these conflicting? This used to be working nicely before the reinstall... Thanks, Diederik

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Her is an example of what I am talking about
by bulia byak 22 Aug '07

22 Aug '07

On 8/21/07, Bibi Morris <bibimorris@...856...> wrote: > Yes I understand what you are saying, however I am not seeing that > happening in 45.1. > > When you tried it, and got what I wanted, did you have to do a break > apart to preserve the centers of the letters? Nope. I think I understand what's going on. The culprit is the font you use. See, when a path contains an inner subpath, that subpath makes a hole only when the direction of that subpath is contrary to that of the outer path. Otherwise, if their directions are the same, there's no hole - the path is solid. That's why, if you convert an O to a path and break apart, you get two paths, and when you combine them back, you get the hole back. If you break apart, Path > Reverse the inner path and combine, you won't get a hole. Now, in your font, for some weird reason, the direction of path in "o" is opposite to that of "d" and "g". Therefore when you convert "dog" to path, the places where the letters overlap become holes. And Union of a path with itself only removes the non-hole overlaps as extraneous; it does not touch holes because it assumes they are there for a reason. Therefore, you could not remove those holes in letter overlaps neither by offset nor union. One way to fix this would be, after converting to path, select both inner and outer parts of "o", Path > Reverse them, then combine everything back and Union. Or just use a different font :) It would also help, btw, to not work always in Outline mode - in normal mode it's much easier to see if some overlap is a hole or not (because you have fill). You could also note in regular mode that you have an atrociously huge stroke width (73px!) on your shapes which I assume isn't really necessary for a cutter :) -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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Problem with Scim and choice of fonts with non-latin-characters in name
by Gerrit Sangel 22 Aug '07

22 Aug '07

Hello list, I have two problems with Inkscape: 1. Everytime I want to input Chinese, Japanese, Korean or a Raw Unicode Value, I use Scim (more precisely Skim). Usually, the not yet committed string of characters is displayed on the spot, the same way as ordinary (e.g. German) strings are displayed. When I choose another character in Scim, the previously written character in the text is deleted and replaced by another one. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_input_method#Kana_to_kanji_conversion as an explanation of how this works). In Inkscape, by contrast, the precommited string is displayed in a seperate box which is somewhere on the screen. I can do all the actions there, but it is extremely annoying because I always have to search the little box and not before I submit the string it is shown in the destinated area. See http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/1135/scimgm1.jpg I have the same problem with Abiword, so I guess it is somehow a problem of GTK. But I do not have the problem with Firefox, so I think there must be a solution to it. I do not have any other gtk programs (apart from Openoffice, but there, scim does not work in any way) so I cannot test this any further as to where this happens. I can't really stress how annoying this problem is. It makes Inkscape almost unusable for typing a longer text in a CJK language. I have Gentoo and tested it with version 0.45.1 2. Also I wanted to choose the fonts “EPSON 教科書体Ｍ” and “文鼎PL細上海宋Uni” in a text field. Note the Japanese/Chinese characters in the font name. Inkscape did display the fonts correctly during the initial font choice, but after I chose the font, it just displayed “EPSON”. It did not choose the Font, then, but happily continued using the former font. Thanks Gerrit Sangel

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] [Inkscape-user] Inkscape back up.
by Jon Phillips 22 Aug '07

22 Aug '07

Do it. They are great and paid to do this... -----Original Message----- From: Aaron Spike <aaron@...749...> Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 6:31 PM To: Inkscape User Community <inkscape-user(a)lists.sourceforge.net>; inkscape <inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] [Inkscape-user] Inkscape back up. John R. Culleton wrote: > Whatever Gremlin there was blocking www.inkscape.org has been slain by > some anonymous internet hero. I can get on lne and I'll wager so can > you. I'd really love to know who the gremlins were. I'm considering handing over our root priviledges to osuosl and allowing them to administer the server for us. Any comments or objections? Aaron Spike ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] [Inkscape-user] Inkscape back up.
by Aaron Spike 22 Aug '07

22 Aug '07

John R. Culleton wrote: > Whatever Gremlin there was blocking www.inkscape.org has been slain by > some anonymous internet hero. I can get on lne and I'll wager so can > you. I'd really love to know who the gremlins were. I'm considering handing over our root priviledges to osuosl and allowing them to administer the server for us. Any comments or objections? Aaron Spike

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