When I open 0.92 I see eighteen rather small tools icons down the left-hand side.
For regular preparation of book illustrations, many are not needed.
The first three are useful, but the measurement tool is not.
The rectangle can be good for frames, but the 3D boxes are not.
Circles and ellipses might be used, but not stars or spirals.
lines, fill and gradients are good, I see less use for meshes.
Surely the sculpting items belong together. The concept of a spray-can is alien to vector graphics but is pre-assumed by artists, so maybe a different icon is needed.
This brings us to the most useful tool, the brush that can be pressure sensitive.
The Serif package launches with a gritty chalk - OK, it is a bitmap 'splodger' - but it takes ages to configure it to something useful. Yours is 'clean', but perhaps the 'no preset' default should be 'brush' rather than italic.
On the right is a whole column of icons, mostly to do with snap-to-grid!
My wife has just come in and disagrees with some of what I have written!
She says that she might occasionally use the 'gimmicky' items like stars and boxes, even spirals, but that they should be grouped under a single fly-out, perhaps including the boxes and ellipses.
I will get her to compile her own set of opinions for you!
She has been a graphic designer since we left Cambridge in 1976 and was bitten with the digital bug when she imported her first PC from Taiwan in the early eighties. She added a flatbed scanner and I looked into the anatomy of bitmaps. I wrote a primitive 'splodger' bitmap editor then, with the aim of combining the BW scans as colour planes so that she could show colour proofs to her clients.
My youngest son brought home a copy of Corel 1.1 from school and we have followed all the steps along its way. Corel 3 was useful and by Corel 5 it seemed to do most of what she needed. Windows 10 has now given them the chance to kill off earlier purchases and to make older files unopenable! It has been necessary to launch Corel 13 on an old W7 machine to refile in a format that 17 can open - and now they are pushing 18 and beyond!
Cheers
John
On 06/08/2017 14:41, brynn wrote:
Meanwhile, we'll be glad to help your wife learn how to use Inkscape, in forums, mailing list or IRC. A new beginners guide is being written as we type. But if the current manual (Help menu) is too hard to understand, she's welcome to meet us in those places.
Personally, and even as someone who first learned Inkscape as a complete computer graphics novice, I can't imagine a "light" or "lite" version which would really be useful. It seems to be a normal progression (in both my personal experience and experience helping others learn Inkscape over the last several years) that as soon as users have those more simple tools understood and under control, they are hungry to continue learning at the next level. And they would not have that opportunity with a lite version. Just the existance of an easy or light version might make them afraid to install the regular version, and I think that situation should certainly be avoided at all costs!
I can see perhaps a children's version, aimed at maybe 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders. Or maybe an artist version, or cartographers version....oh, or a version for people who use those digital cutter machines would be awesome. I can see it where the difference is about what Inkscape is being used for. But I would be against a beginners version and advanced version.
Speaking of beginner or advanced, I have comprehensive list of links to tutorials, organized by skill level, if that would be helpful: https://forum.inkscapecommunity.com/index.php
All best, brynn
-----Original Message----- From: Martin Owens Sent: Saturday, August 05, 2017 9:51 PM To: John Billingsley ; inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] [Inkscape-user] inkscape-0.92.2pre0 - testers welcome
Hi John,
Part of the work of bringing Inkscape's UI into editable files is creating a minimalised version. This would limit the tools, the options and various other bits of the user interface.
But the work to free up Inkscape's user interface from code and into UI files needs to be completed before it would be possible to do a good job with the minimal ui variant.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Sun, 2017-08-06 at 10:24 +1000, John Billingsley wrote:
I have had a glance at 0.92 and what you have done seems excellent.
But my wife is the family artist, and although she likes to think she is computer-savvy, the system is much too 'busy' for her.
You have tried to do everything for everyone in it, while her needs are much simpler. A pressure sensitive non-textured brush, with layers, fills and transparency settings and the ability to trace a bitmap will see her well on her way.
Many other packages have gone the way of excessive complexity. Corel Draw was fine around version 8, but has since gone overboard. Other packages that are bitmap based offer so many brushes that they bewilder.
So I suggest that you also launch some 'lite' versions, in which you merely conceal a large number of the tools and their options, making the working space much friendlier. Of course customisation can achieve this, but if a released version has just the 'essential' tools with instructions on how to reveal more, you might get a wider and more appreciative take-up. Your testing should be performed by artists, not by computer professionals!
Best wishes John
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