On Sat, 2005-02-19 at 16:20 -0400, bulia byak wrote: Hi Bulia!
First of all, thanks for the on-canvas effort. While my Inkscape is still compiling for me to test it, I have to reply to the bits I have something to say ;)
Document Preferences could be labelled as "Document Properties" or simply Properties (it is in the file menu so it is implied that it is the Properties of the current file). It would help disambiguate it from the standard Preferences (and allow a more terse label).
I disagree. "Preferences" and "properties" sound like synonyms. Having them side-by-side is very confusing. "Inkscape preferences" and "Document preferences" explain exactly what they are, stress both their similarity and their difference, and are totally unambiguous.
In fact I find having the items Inkscape Preferences and Document Preferences next to each other bleed my eyes every time I enter the file menu. I don't think I've seen object *preferences* in an application before. Preferences to my knowledge are always linked to *behavior*.
There's been some discussions wrt settings versus preferences where the difference isn't that obvious, however preferences and properties are definitely not synonyms. Preference is subject to change user by user. A user changes application preferences to better suit his/her workflow.
I had to look up property in a dictionary to get a clear definition since I ended up in tautologies ;)
"That which is proper to anything; a peculiar quality of a thing; that which is inherent in a subject, or naturally essential to it; an attribute; as, sweetness is a property of sugar."
You want to change document properties to change its measurable attributes, not how it should behave if you poke it. "I like them big" does sound like a preference rather than a property but let's just stop confusing you ;)
I very much agree with Alan File>Inkscape Preferences and File>Document Preferences are very alien both when it comes to menu placement and the label itself. Since you already use File then File>Properties makes so much more sense especially when you already have Object>Properties (well it's object>object properties :/).
Edit>Preferences is the proper thing to do if you want Gnome users to be familiar with Inkscape's interface, but doing that requires to do a radical thing restructure the menus completely which is quite a thing, but definitely worth doing if you compare GIMP1.2 and 2.0.
I hope this sparks up some interest in making the menus easier to navigate and natural. I sure hope I can bloody detach from the day-to-day work to actually contribute something :/
Anyway thanks for the non-stopping hacking effort!