2010/12/3 Daniel Krause <daniel.alan.krause@...400...>:
Hello all: I've not been active for a while, but I wanted to begin again. My focus is the Technical Drafting portion of Inkscape. I've put together my thoughts in this document. I would love some feed back. https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1hSD8lW0Nv3Z3BHFXXg9vDsBI4U0CaWw1kPz...
- Speed
There's some work already happening on this, and I will step it up after the Cairo branch is merged. For example we can implement proxy rendering, where the rendering of each layer above a certain complexity is cached until it changes.
Accuracy
I guess this is already addressed by numeric precision settings.
Ability to work in Scale
Not sure how this would work. Would Scale be a global setting of the document that affects the transformation between unit input and what is written into the SVG? E.g. at a scale of 1:100, you would write 100mm in the input boxes, but the SVG would contain the value 1mm.
Explore object thickness model and how it is defined
There's not much room for creativity here, SVG just defines it as a style property.
Explore creation of “Preset” tools for line weight setting per tool use
This is equivalent to brushes or named styles, which would make more sense in a drawing application, but would be useful in a CAD setting too. Then we could select by style.
Ability to snap objects to an “Accuracy”
This can already be achieved using grids.
Dimensioning and Annotation system is extremely vital, as that step can take the bulk of the drafting time.
Not sure what exactly do you have in mind, particularly with "Creation of all needed dimension types as tools" - can you explain? I guess only a few people here (and I'm not among them) are familiar with CAD tools.
Ability to pull Document Information from document into Objects.
This would be non-trivial, but could be accomplished in a manner similar to Live Path Effects.
Ability to “Lock” a document from further edits via a form of Publishing system
SVG does not natively offer this kind of capability, but we could prevent Inkscape from changing a "published" document using Inkscape-specific markup. I'm not sure whether Inkscape is the proper place for this functionality - wouldn't this be better handled by a separate document management system?
Ability to have several sheets generated using the same basic geometry
Is this similar to multi-page editing?
Regards, Krzysztof