On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 6:56 PM, Maximilian Albert <Anhalter42@...173...> wrote:
automatically for them. This will render the inconvenient "edit on canvas" button obsolete and make them much more comfortable to use (I'm looking forward to seeing the new lattice deformation in action then :)).
That's great news!
One of the main remaining issues with handles is that we must eventually be able to simultaneously allow KnotHolders and NodePaths for LPE items. E.g., for PB and TtC it is essential to be able to edit the original path while at the same time adjusting the parameters on canvas. Currently this is not possible because an item can only have either a knotholder or a nodepath but not both. My first decent attempts to simply enable both for certain items consistently resulted in crashes.
Like we discussed before, enabling 1 nodepath + multiple knotholders within ShapeEditor should be relatively easy to do. Of course there may be non-obvious problems still, so just show me your patch and where it crashes and I'll try to help.
My idea is this: Let's have a special mode in the pen and/or pencil tool which waits for a given number (say N) mouse clicks, then converts these into a polyline consiting of N nodes and (N-1) straight line segments (no curved paths are possible) and finally automatically applies a specified LPE to this polyline. This would be very similar to how the Spiro spline mode of the pen/pencil tool works now, only that arbitrary LPEs could be applied and that (optionally?) only polylines are allowed. As soon as we have a toolbar for the new geometric LPEs in place, the new "LPE mode" in the pen tool would be activated by pressing the corresponding button. Does this make sense? Any suggestions for details of the workflow?
As we discussed recently on the list an ideal toolbar for pen/pencil, one of my ideas was something like this - a drop-down of LPE presets, some with several different parameter sets. So, Spiros can be enabled by a toggle button, several profile presets for Pattern on Path are also in a widget of its own, and for the rest of LPEs that may make sense to apply-on-create we will have this drop-down.