On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 13:07 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
Bryce told me that some dialogs need redesigning and "Export to bitmap" is one of them. After some serious thinking I came to conclusion that redesigning "Export to bitmap" is not enough. The issue is actually with Save as.../Export dialogs themselves. IMO, there are some inconviniences that need to be fixed.
I think that your thinking of the "Export to bitmap" as a dialog, and not a pallet. Now, I think that perhaps we need to change the name -- but it has been designed as a pallet (i.e. it is not modal, it changes and you interact with the document).
Let's look at these functions through the user case glass.
Designer A has done a nice sketch. Though he likes it, he wants to make another version. He saves it under some other name and keeps working on the new file.
Designer B has done several sketches. Now he wants to send them to his customer in some easy to view file format. He needs to save copy of each original file in a different file format in the same directory, where originals are.
Designer C is constantly exporting bitmaps of different parts of the entire website that he designed. So, he is selecting one group, exporting it as a particular name. Perhaps changing the color of a background, and then exporting several. When selecting each object the filename changes, along with the settings, and he can just click export several times across the graphic.
I don't even doubt that Inkscape will have export parameters dialog for EPS and PostScript (and TIFF as soon as someone writes it). Users are not supposed to see "Export to EPS", "Export to TIFF" etc. menu items in "File", don't you agree? ;)
No, this is definitely in the works. Currently, the biggest blocking factor is that the PNG export code needs to be ported over to being an output extension. There is already support with all the output extensions of them having dialogs for more information on save, but I don't believe any of them are using it currently.
So, in summary, I think that there needs to be two things here, the export to bitmap feature as it currently is provides a dialog for designers who are constantly using this feature. Also, there needs to be an export function that is a little more generic and can be used for many other formats.
--Ted