- Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

Grids
by Maximilian Albert 13 Dec '07

13 Dec '07

Hi all! Diederik, thanks a lot for enabling the axonometric grid in SVN! It's great to play around with it. Just one small thing I noticed: It doesn't honour the "snapping enabled" option in the Document Properties dialog. As I was giving it a try I was for a short moment a bit confused that the newly created grid (which had the checkbock "visible" ticked) didn't appear on the canvas - until I remembered to press '#' to make all grids visible. I still believe that users unfamiliar with the way it works may be quite confused by this behaviour. Any suggestions how to make the difference between enabling grids globally and individually more obvious to users? Would it be sufficient to add a caveat to the the tooltip in Document Properties? Max P.S.: Just noticed one other thing. When more than one grid is present then pressing '#' always switches to the tab of the first grid in Document Properties. This is a bit annoying when you actually want to work with the second grid, for example. Is there an easy way to change this?

9 17

The 3D box tool is dead. Long live the 3D box tool!
by Maximilian Albert 13 Dec '07

13 Dec '07

Hi all, I don't know how many times I announced this, but it has finally happened: As of rev #16681 the new, completely reworked(TM) 3D box tool code is now in SVN, hopefully still in time for 0.46. Those of you who played around with the tool before may have noticed that although it was certainly usable, there were a couple of issues; most notably, undo/redo didn't work reliably, some box configurations in degenerate perspectives were not really stable, etc. But most of all, development was getting more and more of a pain, making both debugging and adding new features tremendously difficult. All this was due to the internal architectural design of the tool at the time. Since I didn't see a way to easily sort this out by continuing the chosen path (and even if I had, it would only have led the tool even further into a dead end as far as extensibility and applicability to other 3D related tasks are concerned), I decided that it would be better to rewrite a lot of it more or less from scratch. I apologize that this has taken me so long, but I'm studying for my finals right now (or rather should be :-/ ), which has been a major distraction for completion. Anyway, the bulk is done now, and I'd like to give you a very quick overview of the changes. As far as the "ordinary" user is concerned, the overall behaviour of the tool is roughly the same as before, except that it is more stable and reliable. :) (In particular, there haven't been any great new features added yet). The most notable visible changes are the following: - Boxes now come equipped with a default depth, i.e. simply dragging on the canvas creates a full-featured box. This hides the allegedly hard-to-discover Shift+drag feature from the user and makes it easy for newcomers to find out what the tool actually does. - Boxes sharing the same perspective move together when a vanishing point is dragged, as if they form part of the same 3D scene that is simply viewed from a different angle (before, they all moved independently of each other). This makes it easy to create entire scenes and adjust them as a whole during drawing. If you want boxes to move independently of each other, you can split perspectives up by shift-dragging a vanishing point. For a full list of this and other features of the tool, please wait until I have updated the Release Notes (a copy will be posted to this list). So much for the visible part of the tool. For those who are interested here comes a more in-depth description of the internal changes: 1) *All* 3D box related structures (namely, the box itself, its sides, and also perspectives) are now handled as SPObjects, which fixes the annoying issues with undo/redo. A notable consequence is that the SVG representation of boxes is now slightly different than it was before, which probably renders old files invalid or even unusable. This shouldn't be a great issue, though, since the tool has not officially been enabled yet (which turns out to be a good decision). I'm going to give the current representation a final revise in the next one or two days, but I don't expect it to change any more. 2) Perspectives are now added to the document's defs so that they can in principle be reused by other objects. This doesn't have an immediate effect on the tool itself but should make applications to other 3D related situations easier. 3) Before the refactoring, all constructions were made geometrically by computing connecting lines, points of intersection, etc. The way it works now is that we use the information given by the three vanishing points to compute a mapping from 3D space to the canvas which results in the specified perspective. By computing inverse images of canvas points, this allows us to determine "real" 3D coordinates of boxes, to model the concept of lengths (at least to a certain extent), to compare coordinates of boxes, etc. Also, degenerate perspectives can be handled in a numerically stable way because not the boxes themselves are degenerate but only their _images_ on the canvas. In fact, this description is a bit of an oversimplification. In order to compute the mentioned perspective mapping, it is necessary to (at least implicitly) specify a _fourth_ point on the canvas, which can be thought of as the origin of the coordinate system (whose three axes point towards the vanishing points). This fourth point is not currently represented on screen. A while ago in one of our discussions Bulia suggested that it should be hidden from the user because its meaning might be unintuitive. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced and I'm tempted to leave it as an option to the user whether it should be drawn on the screen or not (it can also be quite useful for adjusting 3D scenes). Any opinions from other people? At present you can visualize this point by pressing 'O' in the 3D box tool (you may need to draw a box first). This draws a small pink point on the canvas. Note that I added this shortcut for debugging purposes and it will be removed later on. Think of this point as the "anchor" of the coordinate system - it is the only point that always remains fixed when vanishing points are dragged. Well, that is pretty much all I can think of at the moment. Please ask if you are missing anything or if something remained unclear. In principle, everything should more or less work now. There are a few known issues I'm going to sort out in the next days, including (but probably not limited to) the following: - I had to temporarily disable the spin buttons in the toolbar after introducing an undo-related crash yesterday (Inkscape chokes with the message "assertion failed: (doc->priv->sensitive)"). I will debug this and make them work again very soon. In the meantime, the states of vanishing points can be toggled using the shortcuts "X", "Y", and "Z". In addition, the angles of infinite perspective lines can be rotated using the various types of brackets - namely [], (), {} (where Alt+dragging results in a very small rotation angle). - Although z-orders should be set reliably now, there may be a few degenerate cases where they are still wrong (I think I know which these are). If you discover such a case, you can send me a corresponding *.svg file if you wish. - Transformations of boxes work, but if a single box is transformed this also transforms all other boxes sharing the same perspective. Bulia said that instead this box needs to be unlinked. Will fix this soon. - Stroke, patterns, and gradients are not yet adapted during transformations. I'll have to see how to do this because transformations are implemented differently in 3D boxes than in the other tools. Any general pitfalls I need to know or keep in mind regarding this? - Constrained dragging of handles (by using Ctrl) somehow sets the box off a certain amount from the intended position. Don't know precisely what causes this but I hope it won't be hard to fix. - flipping boxes doesn't update its z-orders - ... whatever you may discover ... As always, if there are any questions, comments, suggestions, you name it - please don't hesitate to tell me. And now: Happy testing and enjoy. :=) Cheers, Max P.S.:There is still a number of debugging messages present in the code (most of them commented out, but maybe I forgot some). I will of course get rid of them soon, but currently they are helping me in resolving the remaining issues, so I left them in.

5 8

compile error on windows
by bulia byak 13 Dec '07

13 Dec '07

trying to compile with bob's latest mingw: In file included from src/transf_mat_3x4.cpp:17: src/syseq.h: In function 'void SysEq::fill_random(double (*)[T], double, double)': src/syseq.h:74: error: there are no arguments to 'random' that depend on a template parameter, so a declaration of 'random' must be available src/syseq.h:74: error: (if you use '-fpermissive', G++ will accept your code, but allowing the use of an undeclared name is deprecated) -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

3 3

Error: Unknown verb name
by Maximilian Albert 13 Dec '07

13 Dec '07

Hi, for a while now I have been getting the following error messages during startup if Inkscape: ** (inkscape:6536): WARNING **: Unknown verb name: EditCloneOriginal Unable to find: EditCloneOriginal ** (inkscape:6536): WARNING **: Unknown verb name: EditCloneOriginal Unable to find: HelpKeys ** (inkscape:6536): WARNING **: Unknown verb name: HelpKeys Unable to find: org.inkscape.help.keys Even "make clean" didn't help. Any ideas where they come from? I can't imagine that everyone is seeing this because no one else has complained so far. Thanks! Max

2 3

Process for patching 2geom
by John Faith 13 Dec '07

13 Dec '07

Hello, A while ago I submitted a patch which helps OS X build to the 2geom SourceForge tracker assuming that the patch would be added to 2geom, then 2geom would be updated in inkscape source. Is this correct or should I submit a patch to the new launchpad system? It's been about a month and nothing has happened with the patch, so I guess I must have done something wrong. Thanks!, John

3 2

Inkscape overcomes Xara in Google Trends
by bulia byak 12 Dec '07

12 Dec '07

http://www.google.com/trends?q=inkscape%2Cxara Note that "xara" does not always refer to the vector editor, so in reality it's even better for us. Now, to support the momentum, we must release a smashing 0.46 soon enough, and make a lot of noise about it. It really deserves it. (Note by the way that while we are ahead in user interest, we are nowhere to be seen on the lower graph which reflects mentions in the news. That's not fair.) GSoCers and all others, please let's get to work one more time and fix all the loose ends in your projects. They need not be perfect but the most glaring user-visible problems must be ironed out for Inkscape to reach a releaseable state. You know who you are and what you need to do :) If you think that your project is already good enough for a release, please drop a note here, otherwise let us know of your current state, what remains to do, and when you are planning to finalize your work. And, let's make bugfixing a priority right now, even without waiting for a freeze. We have a scary number of open bugs in the tracker. Yet we now have so many developers that if each one closes just one bug a day, we'll make the tracker shrink pretty fast. Note that closing a bug need not necessarily involve coding; you can just take some old bug, test it and close as fixed or unreproduceable. Any help from non-developers is of course very welcome too. Let's all test, report, comment, add info, code, test again, and close as many bugs as possible. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

19 38

svn/deb
by Alexandre Prokoudine 12 Dec '07

12 Dec '07

Hi, >From what I remember, there is a repository to provide .deb files for SVN revisions. Should we add it to http://inkscape.org/download/, "Compiled Packages" section? Alexandre

2 3

need-review: Default Metadata Preferences Patch
by Felipe Sanches 12 Dec '07

12 Dec '07

hi! I have just submitted a patch that implements a "default metadata" page on the preferences dialog. This defines the default values to be used as metadata for newly created documents. I need someone to review this code, please. It works fine for me. There is just one little issue: I havent been able to figure out how to update the status of the license radiobuttons on the documentMetadata dialog. Some more experienced programmer could, please, take a look at it? I imagine that it may be a simple thing that is still just not clear enough for me. This is my first patch for inkscape, so I am not much comfortable yet with the overall structure of the program. here is the patch: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1746892&group_id=9… thanks, Juca

7 15

Inkscape 0.46 Chill
by Bryce Harrington 12 Dec '07

12 Dec '07

It looks like we've given enough time for finalizing development work, so I'd like to shift us into release mode by entering our Chill phase. Here's the tasks to focus on now: Chill. Development focuses on wrapping up. Identify 'make distcheck' issues Triage bug reports Run an About Screen contest First draft of Release Notes. Update tutorials and other docs Triaging is probably the biggest task ahead of us. I'll try to focus my time on assisting here; I'll try to focus on scripting of bulk changes, as I've got several ideas for cleanup projects on the wiki. Ted, could you post a listing of recent development work, and collect status from the developers, so we can see if there's any remaining absolutely must-do tasks before we release? ACSpike, would you mind doing a first pass at running make distcheck and post to the list what errors there are that we'll need to sort out? Ryan Lerch, can you give us an update on where things stand for bug triaging, and where other people can get involved? Scislac, would you be able to run an about screen contest for us again? I figure we can do it just like the 0.45 contest. Bulia, the Release Notes look like they're in great shape, but you generally have the best eye of any of us on them. Could you identify any major holes we need filled (esp. with names of people we need to get to write stuff up). ScislaC and Bulia - how do we sit currently respecting tutorials and docs? I think it's too late in the game to start writing any new ones, but if there's high priority stuff that absolutely must get done, we should list it out now and make sure we've got people to tackle them. Finally, if anyone has questions or concerns of anything that needs to be handled or accounted for during this release, or wishes to help out directly in the release process, this is the time to speak up. Let me know of any release issues and I'll help make sure they get straightened out. Bryce On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 10:56:46AM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote: > Hi all, > > Now that GSoC projects are finished and the code has had time to > stabilize, it seems a good time to get the 0.46 release moving ahead. > With Gutsy released, I finally have some time to contribute towards > Inkscape release work, and will help try to get efforts organized. > > I'd like to propose the following release plan, based roughly on the > 0.45 plan. Let me know if there's anything missing. > > 1. Open development. > > 2. Chill. Development focuses on wrapping up. > Identify 'make distcheck' issues > Triage bug reports > Run an About Screen contest > First draft of Release Notes. > Update tutorials and other docs > > 3. Frost. Most development complete. > Release Notes should be >90% filled in. > Bug Hunt: 500 points > Post inkscape-0.46-alpha.tar.gz > > 4. Feature Freeze. No further development work. > Disable features that can't be finished in time > Focus on critical bug fixing. > Finalize all tutorials, docs, etc. > Finalize all extensions > Translators create translations. > Inkscape must pass 'make distcheck' > Post inkscape-0.46-beta.tar.gz > > 5. Hard freeze. Only release wardens can commit to mainline. > No further string changes > Focus on release-critical bug fixing. > Finalize translations, release notes, etc. > Packagers test creating pkgs of the -beta release > Post inkscape-0.46-rc1.tar.gz > > 6. Branch. Establish the Stable Branch for release > Complete any late-late-late work. > Final verification of packaging, release notes, > docs, etc. > Publish more release candidates until ready for > release. > Plan 0.46.1+ release(s), if needed > > 7. Release. Post inkscape-0.46.tar.gz > Post packages > Post official announcements > > 8. Open development. > > > I'm sort of thinking for this release we ought to plan on establishing a > stable branch much earlier than we've done before, and maintain split > devel / stable branches for a bit (maybe a couple months). I think > that'd allow us to spend much more time than usual getting things > release-worthy, without too heavily impacting people who wish to keep > doing development work. > > We'll have a bunch of interesting random tasks (mostly non-coding) to do > to get the release polished up and ready to go. Are you interested in > participating in the release team? Let me know! > > Bryce

15 49

filters UI
by Felipe Sanches 11 Dec '07

11 Dec '07

nicholas, when I open the filters dialog in a document that doesnt have any filter primitives, I can see all of the settings widgets in the dialog. They should be hidden, instead. can you please try to fix this issue? Felipe (Juca)

1 0