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Re: [Inkscape-devel] New tiling interface proposal
by Valerie 23 Mar '12

23 Mar '12

> http://i.imgur.com/DMCvU.png Oh phew, thank you so much for making that! I was trying to make something like that too but a bit different, and some of those symmetries were starting to make me feel Very cross-eyed. Basically I was thinking that a table for all the tiling types (both wallpaper and Frieze) with the following visual guides would be useful: 1. The base tile guide with no transformation indicators 2. The base tile guide with indicators (use can toggle indicators on and off) 3. The preview when creating the guide (either what you did here, or Thorsten's previews) 4. An outline preview of extra tiles (can be toggled on and off, shows basically the outline of those extra tiles as you've made here) 5. My idea was to also make base tile guides that show you which tile side ends up reflected on which side. This is meant to help a person who wants to program the "guide points" feature: - Two "corresponding" sides will be represented by dotted lines of the same colours. (example: for simple translation, the left and right sides would be dotted lines of one colour, and the up and down sides of another colour). An arrow marks the "direction" of each side. - Each side that transforms onto itself is represented by a full line. It is marked either by a single arrow (if the transformation is in the same direction) or two arrows in opposite directions (if the tile is flipped) 6. Base tiles again, this time with examples of guide points and guide segments. (yeah, that makes a lot...) > I do have to throw out there at this point, the proposed UI > for tiling at http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Tiling_tool > is incredibly complex. One of the benefits to a dedicated tool > is actually being able to manipulate parameters on-canvas. Are you reading the latest version (there were many versions...)? Because all the things that can be manipulated on canvas Are manipulated on-canvas... The dialogue is only choosing options (there are a lot of options... much more than your average LPE, even), the number of copies, and hitting "apply" (none of which are really on-canvas interactions). I've thought of the use of tile shadow outlines to help users see what will be rendered. The problem is dynamics. They make the tile outlines unpredictable in the first place... That's why I came up with extra render "target" options, so users can choose to render over a specific, non-rectangular area, or even better, to render as a target's pattern (if .svg allows that), so users can then manually control any offsets with the pattern tool. Now, I was actually thinking about on-canvas handles for manipulating dynamics, but that's a whole other can of worms... (and given the time needed to render dynamic tiles, I'm not so sure it's such a good idea to have them updated live...) I'm open to suggestions though. I've made a number of mock-ups proposals for tilings until now, and this is just the latest iteration (the... fifth I think? If I count the few ideas I first had a few years ago). If someone has a general direction in mind (beyond "it has to be a tool"), I can try to see if I can work out something.

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Release of binaries
by Johan Engelen 23 Mar '12

23 Mar '12

Hi all, Apparently, there is a policy to release binaries at the same time, instead of simply uploading them to Sourceforge whenever they become available. I would like to see this changed to the latter option. I see no point in why people on one platform would have to wait for binaries becoming available on the other. Thanks for your consideration, Johan

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QR code request.
by john Culleton 23 Mar '12

23 Mar '12

I note that Inkscape offers the Datamatrix bar code as an option. However another 2d bar code is now in common use, the QR code which can be read by many handheld devices. I wonder if a QR generator could be added to Inkscape, perhaps as a GSOC project. -- John Culleton Free list of books for self-publishers: http://wexfordpress.net/shortlist.html Police Procedural and Expose: "Death Wore Black" "Create Book Covers with Scribus" http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html

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Additional print file outputs.
by john Culleton 23 Mar '12

23 Mar '12

The printer Lightning Source Inc. will only accept print files for book covers in the form of PDF X/1-a:2001 or TIFF. Neither is available from Inkscape 0.48.2. While conversion of a png file is available through ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick this requires use of the the command line which the current generation has been taught to fear. So I wonder if one or both options could be built in to a future version of Inkscape. Perhaps this could be a GSOC project. -- John Culleton Free list of books for self-publishers: http://wexfordpress.net/shortlist.html Police Procedural and Expose: "Death Wore Black" "Create Book Covers with Scribus" http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html

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0.48.3.1 Windows installer
by Krzysztof Kosiński 23 Mar '12

23 Mar '12

Hello all I have a Windows installer ready, and it seems to work correctly. It is 36 MB, so too big to send via email. Where should I upload it so that others might test? Regards, Krzysztof

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] New tiling interface proposal
by Valerie 22 Mar '12

22 Mar '12

> Yes, the Rosetta group has two basic patterns: simple rotations > (restricted to angles that evenly divide into 360) and rotation plus > reflection - I didn't see the reflection option in your design, perhaps > I missed it. It's in the Tiling dialogue mock-up for Radial tiling, and in the description of the work sequence for the "Add tiling type" section. I guess I should make a table with the transformation options, and add the Frieze options while I'm at it. On the previews: I'm actually trying to keep the guides themselves as uncluttered as possible where extra indicators are concerned. That's because one look at the detailed wikipedia base tiles convinced me that they're more confusing than helpful. As I said, there already are previews, before you create the guides. I think that they're enough to give users an idea of what's going on. Besides, the shapes themselves usually give a clue as to what the transformation will be (if it's a triangle, you know that it isn't simple translation). The guides can be transformed like any other object, so you can resize, rotate and flip them like normal objects. I believe the guide points feature is more useful than giving more indicators on the guides themselves: at the end of the day, when the user is designing a seamless tile, what he needs to know most is how a line going out of the tile will connect to the next tile. What happens to the corner of the base tile isn't as useful. Here's the description again: > When a guide point is created on one side of a guide, counterparts > are automatically created on all other sides of the basic guide. All > changes to the original will be reflected onto the new tile. > What's more, you can click and drag this guide to create a guide > segment. By snapping a node on a guide point and snapping its > handle to the end of the guide segment, and by repeating the > operation with the node's counterpart, the user can create smooth > transitions from one tile to the next. Guide points can be moved along the corners of the guides. When you do so, all its counterpoints are updated dynamically. I guess the current mock-ups aren't clear enough, I'll have to make a few new ones. Look at this program: http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/software/penrose/ Unlike this program, the guide points can be moved along the sides of the guide. Like this program, by dragging on some of them, a segment is created that also appears on all the guide points' counterparts. Do you understand the concept now? You can know exactly how a line going out of the tile will go back in. As for the tiling shadow, the problem is how many tiles will be displayed. Controlling the number of tiles must be done from the tiling dialogue rather than from the tiling guide tool. I guess I could add a "show tiles outline" option to the tiling dialogue.

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Inkscape GIS
by Stefan de Konink 21 Mar '12

21 Mar '12

On 17-03-12 20:55, Brylie Oxley wrote: > Thank you for suggesting Mapnik Stefan! :-) Inkscape would be a suitable > GUI for a Mapnik based cartography solution. I do not think that > Inkscape and Mapnik are necessarily in opposition, do you? The major problem is, if you look at cartography to SVG is that data is not offered in layers you would actually use in regular print. The output of mapnik is actually a set of drawing commands. So your audience might require two approaches; - ability to get an arbitary piece of a map, and the ability to interactively edit the stylesheet, see output etc. Inkscape could help here because stylesheets contain a lot of SVG elements you want to edit along the map; the result of this operation is a stylesheet, and a set of icons. - the ability to get arbitrary data in layers and be your own renderer, stack layers, assign decimation, add colours etc. this would be closer to having a shapefile in a solution like Illustrator and modifying it. Opposed to mapnik this step requires the editor to do 'layer' operations theirselves. Stefan

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Running Inkscape from non-default location (Ubuntu)
by Jeremy Villalobos 21 Mar '12

21 Mar '12

Hello: I checked out and built Inkscape 0.49x on Ubuntu following the Guide's instructions http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingUbuntu But when I run the program from the non-standard location, the 0.48x version pops up (the one instaleed with the repo manager) What env vars do I have to set/modify to run the program from the non-default location. Or does 0.49x has the wrong version being reported ? thanks Jeremy

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PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE
by a kayzar 20 Mar '12

20 Mar '12

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Mathematical Art for teenagers
by veronika 19 Mar '12

19 Mar '12

Hi, I am a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC, Canada) and I am interested in the GSoC program. I am interested in the exploration of Math through the creation of Digital Art and how this can be used in classrooms and after school clubs to promote interest in Math and develop skills particularly among students in the age range 13 to 18. I have conducted an after school club with students in which we used Inkscape, Scratch/BYOB and various applets. Some of the results from this club can be seen in my blog: http://visquest.blogspot.ca. There are several projects that I would be interested in working on. One area is to take a topic such as Tessellations and fill out the tool set as needed to make these projects accessible for young teenagers. There is an excellent web site (http://www.tessellations.org) which describes many techniques for creating tessellations and there is a tutorial for performing the basic steps in Inkscape (http://www.digitalartforall.com/1267/inkscape-creating-tessellations/), together these make a very good starting point. Some of the places where students stumble are 1) Understanding commands such as Path-Division and Path-Union 2) Performing Translation and Rotation so that the pieces line up correctly (need a way to mark an alignment guide on both pieces based on style of tessellation) 3) The Tiling dialog is very complicated and does not support an iterative approach. Another area is to look at the learning potential for something like the Spirograph extension (or L-System extension or many other extensions) and how it could be improved. For example, there is quite a lot of interesting math to explore with hypertrochoid and epitrochoid curves, however, the current dialog approach does not give the user an intuitive understanding of how the circles move relative to one another. In contrast, the Spiromath applet (http://www.mathplayground.com/Spiromath.html) gives nice visual feedback about the relative motion but is very limited in its drawing capabilities. A fun project would be to turn the Spirograph extension into a tool, extend it to allow for shapes other than circles and give more direct control over things like pen position, number of revolutions (including the ability to rewind if it has gone too far) etc. I am interested in using Inkscape in my thesis research as a key part of a Mathematical Art environment and would welcome the opportunity to work with a mentor. I am interested in gaining experience developing tools and extending the user interface. Kind regards, Veronika -- View this message in context: http://inkscape.13.n6.nabble.com/Mathematical-Art-for-teenagers-tp4632081p4… Sent from the Inkscape - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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