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Undefined ratio between px and inch
by unknown＠example.com 16 Jan '11

16 Jan '11

Hi all, On the user maillist there has been a discussion on a (imo) very serious flaw in the units (px, cm, in, m, ...) in Inkscape. In short, all units except 'px' are a 'lie'. Inkscape stores lengths in 'px' unit, while the SVG standard nowhere specifies the ratio between 'px' and one of the other units Inkscape features (like inch, cm, m, ...). Inkscape relates inch and other units to 'px' by assuming 90 px = 1 in. This is not defined in the SVG standard nor in the SVG file Inkscape creates. Although SVG permits the use of several other units besides 'px', for example inches, Inkscape luckily uses only px units to store graphics (correct me if I am wrong). This means that all objects will scale the same, whatever the ratio between 'px' and 'inch' is chosen on interpretation. Unfortunately, the absolute length information of objects is lost. These two rects have the same dimensions in Inkscape, but not in some other viewers (e.g. firefox): <rect width="90" height="90"/> <rect width="1in" height="1in"/> My concern is the following. Inkscape now chooses 90 px = 1 in. But this information is not stored in the SVG. If someone desides to have Inkscape follow the CSS default (96 px = 1 in) and changes Inkscape's code, this would mean that all old files will be opened with wrong dimensions. For webgraphics, perhaps not a big deal. For my book cover, for my technical drawings, etc... this is a very very big deal. So we have to come up with an idea to explicitly define the lengths of the units we expose to the user. Jon has suggested using the 'viewBox' attribute. In think that <svg width="2in" height="2in" viewBox="0 0 180 180"> would explicitly define Inkscape's measure of 90 px = 1 inch (viewbox coords are expressed in px). Perhaps there are better ideas to solve this. Ciao, Johan

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inkscape.org a call for assistance
by Ian Caldwell 16 Jan '11

16 Jan '11

hello, It's come that time again, We're currently making decent progress with the current website, however as we all know things take times and we all have our own day jobs. So we've come to you to ask for help in the following three categories 1. *General Content* - This is where we need your help proofreading our current content. - Adding to the existing content - Porting over old content such as news and tutorials etc. and in general just making the pages ready for primetime 2. *Mockup -> html/css* - This is where you will take the mockups that we get from our designer and port them to valid html/css the main site design is already in place, so it should be fairly basic.... 3. *DJANGO* - Lets face it we've got a lot of great ideas for the site, but we need your help in implementing the various features! If you're skilled with Django we'd love your help even if it's just for a few hours a week! If you're willing and able to contribute in any way, we'd love to have your help! feel free to reply here or join us on irc.freenode.net in #inkscape-web . We could really use your help! special thanks to Chris Morgan, Leo Jackson and Hinerangi Courtenay. We appreciate all your help! We need everyones feedback in making this the best website for everyone involved! please feel free to email me privately or the list and please list what you'd like to help with.... Thanks, Ian "Inc" C.

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Call for SCALE 9x participation
by Jon Cruz 15 Jan '11

15 Jan '11

Hello all, Inkscape is setting up once again to exhibit at SCALE this year Feb 25-27. http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale9x/ We get a few passes to help man the booth, so if anyone might be able to travel to the conference to help us out, we can get you in. Just let me know off-list if you happen to be interested and able to attend. Thanks.

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text object rotation & position coordinates (x and y values)
by Bric 15 Jan '11

15 Jan '11

Hi, all. I am trying to use a script to edit inkscape SVG code, and mostly succeeding, except with coordinate values. Specifically, with text objects, there seems to be some tricky function generating the "x" and "y" values (object coordinates). The function seems to be tied to the transform values. With no transformation in effect (theoretically, with the matrix being (1,0,0,1,0,0) -- i say theoretically because the line is absent when these are the (implied) values), the "x" and "y" values are what one would expect, when one drags the object left and right, up and down. The x and y values change in the expected manner. However, when the text object gets transformed, as in the example below: transform="matrix(0.42584538,0.90479595,-0.90479595,0.42584538,0,0)"> transform="matrix(0.42584538,0.90479595,-0.90479595,0.42584538,0,0)" the x and y values become severely strange... Dragging the text object vertically affects the x value (as well as the y value), and horizontal drag affects both as well. The values become negative in an unexpected way. And visually, the objects are not where the script attempts to place them. Could someone please clue me in about the function (the math of it)? thanks in advance

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idea: Exposée-like effect for visualizing complex stacks of svg elements in Inkscape ?
by Felipe Sanches 12 Jan '11

12 Jan '11

I have been using inkscape a lot recently and I noticed that sometimes it can become very annoying to select svg elements that are in the middle of a pile of other elements. Thus, I was thinking that we could have a key-combo that would break appart all "hidden" shapes to allow you to select one of them, and after that, all shapes would be places back in their correct places. Sometimes I do something similar to that by hand, but an automated UI feature would be very useful. Also, it would be solely a visualization mode, not actualy modifying elements in the SVG DOM. I'd like to have some feedback on this idea. thanks, Felipe Sanches (Juca)

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Suggestion: allow to select next shape color with color selector
by Michael Grosberg 11 Jan '11

11 Jan '11

I wanted to run this by you before submitting a feature request. Currently, if you want to draw a new shape, and you want to select its color and stroke in advance, your only option is to use the swatches - you cant select some arbitrary color for the next shape. Selecting the stroke width is impossible. I suggest making the Fill and stroke dialog active even when nothing is selected, so that changing it affects the next created shape. I know that there's a setting where you can set a specific style for each tool instead of drawing with the last used style. In this case we have two options: 1. Upon changing to a tool that has its own style, the fill and stroke dialog remains grayed out. 2. Upon changing to a tool that has its own style, the fill and stroke dialog changes to reflect this style, and modifying it changes the tool's style for the rest of the session.

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[Blueprint] Informative UI (hyperlink-like shortcuts on UI)
by Pajarico 10 Jan '11

10 Jan '11

I'm working on a specification and would like to now your thoughts. https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/informative-ui Regards and happy new year.

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Palettes
by Teto 09 Jan '11

09 Jan '11

First, all my greetings for the new year ^^. Second the palettes. You can change/configure the color of the fill/stroke with 3 tools: - The one shown with Shift+Ctrl+F - The palettes -> Shift + Ctrl + W - The palette always shown on the bottom of the screen. Until today, I never used the last 2 ones, because they were simply useless for me, preferring the first one (a gimp-like tool). Now it's different, I read the documentation and discovered how to edit the palettes, and change the tip texts (for naming colors). I have to do that by hand, but it's better than nothing. I need user-defined palettes. But. I think that's something is missing: a direct link between the palettes and "Shift+Ctrl+F". In the tool "Shift+Ctrl+F" I'd like to see: - Another tab, named "palette" with a palette that can be changed/edited/saved/whatever dynamically. - 3 buttons (under cursors blur and opacity): 'add' to add the color shown above (for stroke or fill, the one which is active) in the dynamic palette ; 'copy' to copy the color shown above in a special clipboard ; 'paste' to paste the color in the clipboard to the active color. - Of course, the tab 'palette' would have all the comforts: change active color, edit/delete colors, rename them, save/load/create the palette, replace the one in the bottom of the screen, and so on. - The gimp palettes seem to avoid alpha. Pity, but it doesn't matter. These are just my little thoughts in the beginning of the year. Maybe changes are planned for futures versions, I must admit that I didn't watch. If it's not the case I really think that something must be done to change palettes in a more 'user-friendly' way. My 2 cents, Teto. By the way: 0.48.1 is out soon. That rocks! ^^ Great job all developers!

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Building the trunk on Gentoo. Compile problemswith GTK
by Daniel Macks 09 Jan '11

09 Jan '11

On Sat, 8 Jan 2011 11:57:21 -0800, Jon Cruz wrote: > On Jan 5, 2011, at 6:00 AM, Alexander Wright wrote: > > > svg-view.cpp:116:28: error: ‘gdk_cursor_unref’ was not declared in this scope > > svg-view.cpp: In member function ‘virtual void SPSVGView::mouseout()’: > > svg-view.cpp:122:70: error: ‘GTK_WIDGET’ was not declared in this scope > > svg-view.cpp:122:85: error: ‘gdk_window_set_cursor’ was not declared in this > > scope > > make[3]: *** [svg-view.o] Error 1 > > > > Adding #include <gtk/gtk.h> to svg-view.cpp and widgets/sp-color-wheel- > > selector.cpp fixes the problem. > > In general, good practice is to include only the smallest set of headers that a .cpp file will be consuming. Avoiding "kitchen sink" headers brings many advantages including code clarity, better modularity and encapsulation, faster compile times, etc. > > It appears that GTK might be moving away from this. Although adding <gtk/gtk.h> might help 'unbreak' a compile, I'd see if a few explicit additions can help. (BTW, this is a perfect example of problems due to one include file including other include files). gtk has an explicit goal of only allowing a library's main header to be included. With the exception of one or two oddballs (outside scope of normal gtk and gdk use), <gtk/gtk.h> and <gdk/gdk.h> are the only approved ones for public consumption. See: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/CleanupGTKIncludes Don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger:) dan -- Daniel Macks dmacks@...2516...

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Feature request: text object could be viewed differently in the editor
by Mukhtar Ullah 09 Jan '11

09 Jan '11

Dear Inkscape developers, I would love to see a feature from TpX and Jpgfdraw. When using the pdf export with latex option, the latex code may get too long and obscure the other objects in a small figure. In TpX and Jpgfdraw, the properties dialog of the text objects allows to specify two text strings: one for to be typeset and one for the editor to show. If this is implemented in Inkscape, the figures would look neat because then the user needs only write a short hint to the actual latex formula for showing in the editor. Currently I have the following workaround. In a text object with a long latex string, I write the actual latex code in the description property of the text object (by right.clicking on it) and write a short hint to the latex code inside \cm{}. This command I define in the latex document: \newcommand{\cm}[1]{} to make sure that only the description is typeset in the output pdf. Mukhtar

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