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Live Effects Discussion
by Ted Gould 22 Mar '06

22 Mar '06

Hey all, Sorry, I've been effectively offline for over a week, so I'm catching up. I feel like I'm spamming the mailing lists :) Anyway, Aaron, I noticed that you made a branch for live effects. I've thought I little about this -- I was thinking perhaps we can all have a big friendly discussion about some of the ideas/features that would be required. (if there are any Xara developers on the list we'd love your comments on what worked and what didn't) If nothing else, so we don't overlap on any work. Here are some thoughts that I've had, feel free to destroy at will :) - Live Effects need to work with opening and saving a file, so they need to be stored somewhere. I was thinking we could add a "<inkscape:live-effect>" node in the defs section to define each live effect and read them when the file is opened. - Live Effects should be triggered when the original objects are edited, so we need to mark who those are. Probably by node ID. - If one of those nodes is deleted in the process of running the effect, then it should be stored in the live-effect node so that when re-running the effect it can be placed back on the canvas temporarily. - We need to keep track of the objects that are created by the effect, so we can delete them before rerunning the effect. I think this could also be accomplished through a node ID. - If any of the objects created by the live-effect are modified (ie moved) the live-effect is broken. I'm not sure if there should be some warning, or atleast a status bar message for this. I think it is simply to difficult to track the changes. - We need a way for the effects themselves to mark which nodes they created or deleted in their execution. I'm thinking that we can just add a inkscape namespace attribute for the nodes. When we reparse the file, we'll look for those. Then, in the inx file, we can mark whether an effect is "live effects aware" to keep the basic case simple. We may be able to accomplish this through comparing the before and after documents, but that seems likely to cause error (perhaps Mental has some ideas on this?) - I think that live effects should work for output and input extensions too. That way you could have an SVG document that you're working on constantly update the Postscript output copy that you want to have. Of course, this might be slow, but people will find it useful when they have 64-core computers :) - To make the performance reasonable, I think that we'll need to keep parsed copies of the scripts cached. I think I know how to do this with the python libraries. There is already the load/unload mechanism in the extensions to facilitate this. After I finish the extensions dialog, I'll start working on this. (unless someone really knows how to do it, I'd be happy to let someone who knows what they're doing go ahead :) Those are the things that I can think of right now. Comments and ideas are welcome! --Ted

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NEW: better statusbar tips for multiple objects in selection
by bulia byak 22 Mar '06

22 Mar '06

For multiple selected objects, the statusbar now reports their types. For example, if 5 groups are selected, it displays 5 objects of type Group in layer LayerName. instead of just "5 objects selected" as before. If there are up to 3 types in the selection, they will be listed, for example: 5 objects of types Group, Path, Rectangle in layer LayerName. The order of the list will correspond to the order in which the objects were added to selection. If there are 4 or more types in selection, only the number of types is reported, for example: 5 objects of 4 types in layer LayerName. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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Objects not plugins
by Martin Owens 22 Mar '06

22 Mar '06

I was thinking of a way to manage my barcode plugin and was thinking that the way plugins currently run (i.e single process modifies document) is not how a barcode should be managed. it should be some kind of object plugin which allows you to modify the code and see the update in the bars, having the svg on the page will be a must, it would just have hooks so that if the plugin is there you can edit the object with some gui or what ever is required. Best Regards, Martin Owens -- #::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::# #::.. http://www.doctormo.co.uk/ ..::# #::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::#

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icon/swatch sizes
by bulia byak 22 Mar '06

22 Mar '06

Jon, Now I figured out why you're so reluctant to just make the swatches smaller as I proposed: because you used the GTK standard icon sizes for swatch sizes. I don't think this makes a lot of sense, honestly. A swatch is not an icon at all. However, I'll leave this up to you, but in any case I just want to reiterate the need for adding one or two smaller sizes that GTK does not have. You can even make them dependent on the existing sizes, for example by making them 75% and 50% of Gtk::ICON_SIZE_MENU. But we _really_ need them, both for icons and for swatches. The current "small" size of the swatches is NOT small by any stretch of the imagination. By the way, selecting the Huge size of the swatches in the bottom panel crashes Inkscape. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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round corners won't be resized on resizing a object
by Frank Wunderlich 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

Hi, i try to explain the behavior: i have 2 rects: 1 rect with round corners and 1 rect with normal corners inside the first one if i group this 2 shapes and try to make this group smaller, the shape is correctly resized (both rects), but not the corners of the round rect. the radius of the corners must be also adjusted... Greetings Frank

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Clip path and mask UI patch - need guidance
by Joshua A. Andler 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

Knutux has made excellent progress with the clipPath/Mask UI patch (nice couple options in prefs to make it more robust too). However, there are two issues left that are related, but we couldn't figure out the best solution. Note that this is in comparison to both Xara & Illustrator as reference. 1) In Inkscape, currently you can not edit a clippath on canvas (presumably because it's located in defs). I wouldn't imagine this wouldn't be too painful to change, but the aspect of residing in defs brings up the other major difference/problem. 2) In Xara or Illustrator when you clip objects, they're "grouped" together (clipped objects and the clipping path/mask). It doesn't seem like this is easily achieved because of the structure of SVG and defs preceding regular items in the doc. The more complicated of the two issues would be number 2. We kicked around a couple ideas, but neither seemed like the optimal solution so I figure I would ask for advice here. The ideas were having the clipping object in defs be a clone of a "normal" object on canvas. That original object can then be grouped and the clone/clippath would follow a move of the original, and it would theoretically also take care of the editing aspect too. And the other potential solution we thought of was having the clipPath (or mask) in defs just have a link to an object on canvas. Again, that object could then be grouped and would take care of the editing aspect too. To me, neither method seems clean and each would potentially introduce it's own set of issues. Bulia or Mental, do you have any suggestions? -Josh

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Bug in the command line interface of Inkscape on Windows 32 platform ?
by Gilles Foucault 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

I run the Inkscape 0.43+devel, built Mar 20 2006 on Windows 32 platform I would like to export svg files via the command line interface of Inkscape : "C:\Program Files\Inkscape\inkscape.exe" --export-eps=out.eps in.svg But nothing happens, there is no error messages, and inkscape quit immediately. Could you help me with the command line usage in Win32 platform ? Thanks in advance, Best regards Gilles

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LGM braindump
by Jon A. Cruz 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

Here's the first bit of braindump from LGM. (Please keep in mind that I typed this up while flying back to the States, and am not sure how jetlagged I was) -------------------------------- Overall, I think the whole get-together was an amazing success. Many different projects were represented, and a fair mix of end users and potential contributers were also in attendance. Although I would like to see more of the users and just curious there, enough were present to help give a good insight with fresh perspective. There were perhaps up to a couple hundred people in attendance, and it clearly seemed to be even a better turn out than Bryce or I had expected. We had four people with "Inkscape" on their badges, with a few extra people here and there like Cedric. The GIMP had a good presence, as did Scribus and even Xara. The atmosphere was one of the really good aspects of the whole meeting. Unlike many other conferences, this was not just a one-way dispersal of information. Though the presentations were similar, afterwards there was a lot of interaction between people with different groups, and even and users. Also, there seemed to not be any real conflicts or posturing, but rather a lot of genuine collaboration going on with win-win situations popping up all over. Probably the best illustration of this was with the SIOX presentation. Part of the presentation's purpose was to get the word out about the capabilities, and to try to spur more interest. That night one of the Blender guys got hooked, and by the next day had hacked together basic support for SIOX as a standard Blender effect. Each of the teams took advantage of the face-to-face time to have their own group meetings. For example, this was the first time that Craig had actually gotten to actually meet the other people on Scribus. But there was also a lot of communication with people of different groups, and most of the hitting dinner, etc, was completely inclusive. I know that some of the GIMP people expressed a little regret at not being able to get together with some of the non-GIMP people as much as they'd like, but this was only due to being able to get so much done in the various GIMP sit-downs going on. Even so, there was quite a lot that did get done, with various people in different groups each talking with others about all sorts of things. Xara had a booth outside the main amphitheater, and had three people showing what they've been doing. As you probably already know, they took the opportunity to release their source-code, and it seems like the delay 'till now was time well spent. I know that Carl Worth mentioned he downloaded it and not only did it build first try for him, but it actually ran too. The funny thing was that he didn't realize how much progress had been made since the initial demo, and that most of the tools are functional now. Their developers seemed like really good people, and very interested in the whole meeting and everything going on. I'd also met them on the bus from the airport the night before. So there was time spent talking with them on various Xara stuff, but then also a lot of time talking about all the other things going on, the stuff the other developers were talking about, and also some more questions on how best to fit in with the general open-source community. Charles from Xara made it down on Sunday, and after his presentation we had the opportunity to all sit down with him and discuss various Inkscape-Xara issues. The great news is that he honestly seems to "get it", and is working well to try to ensure the release of Xara has the best chance of being a win-win both for the business aspect and for the open-source community. By the end of things it was very clear that both Xara and Inkscape had their own focus, and each has their own reason for being around for quite some time. Probably the main issue for some will be the contributors agreement, however as everyone had time to drill down on things, and also others like Carl Worth from Cairo, it seemed to be a fair approach and my personal feeling is that it won't be a deal-killer for most. Speaking of Carl, he also had time to meet with Charles on his own, and they came away with quite a lot resolved, and a strong interest to see where things will go from here. Among other things, they were looking at various ways that Xara might get things to have Cairo to use their engine, so it will be *very* interesting to see how things progress in that area. One surprisingly inspiring presentation was Marti's talk on color management and littleCMS. Even though I'd been familiar with the concepts, and even had drilled down on littleCMS's API to figure out how to hook it into Inkscape, the talk suddenly made all the pieces fall into place. More importantly, it did so with several groups, and after the talk there was a lot started between us and Scribus in regards to managed color-flow, and we realized that together we actually almost at the point of having base things there and integrated. A lot of stuff they had been doing had gotten them close, and lot of the stuff I'd been doing had gotten us close. Then again, Marti confirmed that for basic support, only three functions of the littleCMS API are needed, so we might see that go in *very* soon. Additionally, we were able to use this to help hammer out with Scribus what direction they might want to take on SVG vs. EPS import, and whether things should be done in Inkscape or in Scribus, and to what degree. We probably ended up changing some minds and getting their focus back on enhancing SVG import, since we figured out some basic ways to support spot colors along with full ICC-profile targeted colors in SVG we will end up putting out. And, of course, Marti will be able to help advise us on the proper approach for a lot of the SVG/CSS color-profile details. One of the Inkscape-specific things that came up was someone from Slovenia being interested in animation support. We discussed quite a few things, including some general ideas of what Inkscape should and should not do in regards to UI and feature support for animation that Andy, Bryce, and I had just been tossing around the day before. This also leverages a bit more resources for enhancing the extensions mechanism, so look for new people to possibly show up soon. Speaking of extensions and plugins... there was a lot of general interest in this from many different people, with many different priorities. One of the more interesting exchanges on this was between myself and Craig from scribus. After some Scribus demos it had come up to me that what we were thinking of might be helpful for them also. Craig got really excited about the main idea of exposing a DOM for plugins, and some of the ways that they might go about doing that. Then we moved on to my ideas for abstracting UI for plugins by using XForms. He hadn't been aware of it before (and in fact was very light on XML background in general) but as I drilled in on more and more details he came to feel that it was a very good approach, and cold solve quite a few of the problems they are hitting up against right now, and even more in the future. He also mentioned this might be a concept to push over to the Xara guys (he'd been spending a fair bit of time with them also). One of the last things to go on was a CREATE BOF. It followed our Inkscape BOF, and ended up being very productive. We had lots of people from many projects, and got some good issues hammered out. Watch for more details on the CREATE mailing list, but a lot was about shared assets like palettes, brushes, etc., ways to share them, and how to make that work well (directories, daemons, things like font mangers, etc.) and not lagging. Another aspect was brought up from the drag-n-drop stuff I've been working on lately. Aside from knowing what to share, we also need to come up with how to put those things properly on the clipboard and for drag-n-drop. One point brought up was that it might be good to work details up and then leverage freedesktop.org to actually get MIME types registered. I'll follow up with more, like how Andy's demo went (great), Pippin's impressive stuff, and ReJon's great talk...

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extension attributes documentation
by MenTaLguY 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

Hi all, In an effort to get the ball rolling for documenting Inkscape's extension attributes, I've populated a wiki entry with them here: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ExtensionAttributes I'd encourage volunteers to have a look and add documentation (just a brief description to start with) for any attributes that interest them. -mental

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Clip path and mask UI patch - committed
by bulia byak 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '06

I have committed Andrius' patch and a couple of fixes of my own. So, clipping and masking are almost usable now. Use and abuse them, and report the results. So far the UI is limited to 4 command in the Object menu. Of course there are lots of issues, this is to be expected; note that while we appreciate your suggestions for how to make the UI better, for now my personal priority is to iron out all the basic behavior and rendering issues, so that at least the UI that we have works flawlessly. Several immediate issues are: - After you moved the clipped/masked object, unclipping/unmasking gives a wrong transform to the clippath/mask. - Mask display is buggy. If you don't see the masked object, try zooming in or out. - Upon unclpping/unmasking, the selection must hold the clipped object and the clippath/mask. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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