On 15 Apr 2006, at 19:38 , Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Fri, Apr 14, 2006 at 07:46:35PM -0500, ted@...11... wrote:
On Fri, 14 Apr 2006, Bryce Harrington wrote:
I've gone ahead and indicated our interest in participating in this year's Google Summer of Code.
Please begin imagining some good projects for us to offer for students to work on. :-) The more ideas, the better!
Thanks everyone for such quick brainstorming! :-)
I've captured the suggestions so far on this page:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Googles_Summer_Of_Code
[...]
Keep the ideas coming!
Hi all,
this was a long discussion to follow! here are things I would very much like to see, as a user. I do not know to which extent they could be SoC projects.
Improving "Inkscape I/O": this is in fact several "small" (or not) things. First would be to finalize the inkjar/zip file formats and use this by default so that inkscape new comers are not bothered with the red cross again. I don't know if it is easy or even possible but embedding fonts into the document would be great too. I was perfectly happy with the link behavior but got to work with people who didn't understand it... and I changed my mind ;-) This would call for a way to edit embedded bitmaps but this was already mentioned (Verse plugin to link to Gimp or direct editing). In parallel a rework of the import/export/save as dialogs could be achieved with: - link or embed in import (if possible with bitmap _and_ vector, so that it's possible to link to SVG files too, click on the linked file and have it open in a new instance of inkscape) - restrict to selection or to any part of the drawing in export with bitmap _and_ vector. For vector this look like just clipping the SVG to the selection and export it so it seems straightforward now that clipping exists. then all non conserving vector file formats (EPS, POV, TEX etc.) could be moved to the export dialog - the save as dialog keeps only inkjar/zip, inkscape svg and inkscape svgz (and plain svg and compressed plain svgz?)
Improving the color panel: This would require to fix some UI things: - "small" size does not look like small when first opening inkscape, you have to switch to an other size and then witch back to small to have them small - the rolling menu on the right of the panel is small when first opening inkscape but as soon as something is changed inside it, it becomes larger. while becoming larger it eats a lot of space so it might not be the best choice for a menu. right click? there was some discussion about it earlier on the mailing list. - add the possibility to resize the panel and/or have it to the right of the desktop Then adding some functionality: - save the state of the panel (size, position, size of the color swatches, which palette was selected) on a per document basis - add a way to build some custom palettes, which would be stored as a (xml?) file. The intend of this is to have to possibility to post them somewhere on the web site and exchange color palettes between users. So this requires also a simple interface to add a downloaded palette to the menu (like a Add palette... menu item). [Side note: this could be extended to effects too, when there will be too many of them to include them all in the menu and this would add a nice community aspect to the website ;-)] - add a style palette, renewed on a per document basis where the user can store fill, stroke and font properties of objects in the drawing by dragging and dropping them on the panel. It would also be nice to have the possibility to exchange those and to import styles from another document into a new one. I think there is a large potential for those in a company or any communication agency which works with some specific templates (in terms of colors, fonts...) for each product. - maybe add a "current styles" palette which is dynamically filled with all styles of objects in the document. OmniGraffle does this and I find this occasionally useful. But it might be memory/CPU hungry.
Improving the Text Tool: I use text and flowed text a lot and these are things that could be improved IMHO: - flowed text does not respect the default style of the text tool - when flowing a text which already contains line breaks, the line breaks are not conserved and are converted to spaces. It would be better to conserve them. - when the style selected in the the Text and Font dialog is applied it erases any other style applied to some part of the text (like italics on some words, bold on others...), it would also be better to keep them. A general way to address this would be to rework the Text and Font dialog (and I think it was planned anyway): - It could include some kind of "story editor" a la Scribus instead of the Text tab. Then text editing and formatting could be done there avoiding the style erase mentioned above. - I don't know a font manager on linux but I guess there should be at least one. It would be nice to have some font collections before the font family selector, in order to narrow the search. I have over 300 fonts on my system (and I guess this is not much compared to some graphic designer) and it is already difficult to find the one I want in the Text and Font dialog. BTW: the Font family list is not searchable with the keyboard while every other GTK list I have seen is.
These are my 2 cents. Thank you for reading all this ;-)
JiHO --- Windows, c'est un peu comme le beaujolais nouveau : a chaque nouvelle cuvee on sait que ce sera degueulasse, mais on en prend quand meme par masochisme. --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/