On 6/23/06, Hugo Rodrigues <haa.rodrigues@...400...> wrote:
It's probably early to start working on it, but where should the filters UI be placed? I suppose the most obvious choice would be having a new "Filter" entry on the "Object" menu, and on context menu.
What would that command open? A dialog? I would like to avoid the illustrator's approach with a menu chock full of commands and each command opening its floating dialog. Instead, what I envision is a Filter tool in the main toolbar, which would do several things:
- when an object with a filter is selected, it displays in the controls bar its topmost filter with its numerical params
- it lets you choose any other from the stack of filters applied to the object, using a drop-down list; the controls change accordingly to the filter type
- it has controls for adding new filter to the stack (from a list of all filters implemented), reordering filters, and deleting filters
- it lets you drag various filter-specific handles on the canvas, for those filters where it makes sense (e.g. visually adjusting blur radii for gaussian blur)
This sounds like a lot of things, but I think with some inventiveness they will fit into the controls bar.
Additionally, we can have a submenu in the main menu with commands: add new filter, remove top filter, remove all filters and probably others. Same commands can be added to context menus also.
In addition to all this, gaussian blur needs to be treated specially, as it's such a fundamental thing. I want to add a blur radius spinbutton everywhere we now have opacity controls, i.e. in the selected style indicator in statusbar and in fill&stroke.
Compared with the illustrator-like dialogs, it would have all the same advantages as the on-canvas gradient editing has compared to the old gradient editing via the fill&stroke dialog.
The path effects (effects that only change the shape of paths, implemented on top of SVG in compatible way) will have a very similar interface, except that they will have an Effect tool of their own. They can also be stacked, chosen from list, edited both on canvas and via numerical fields in the controls bar, etc.
Let me know what you think about this. If this sounds good in general, I will create a few mockups to make this more obvious.