On 10-09-04 4:35 , Chris Mohler wrote:
Yeah - that seems likely :) Again I wish to state that the AI F/S is not fantastic (pretty bad actually) but it does work better than current Inkscape F/S in practice. Without any formal tests I estimate changing an object's color takes me two or three times longer in Inkscape. Which is not that much longer (maybe ~1 second) but I find it annoying.
I am sure that it is so. The color of the stroke is just another quality of the stroke. With the current GUI, it makes perfect sense to join the stroke 'paint' and 'style' into one 'Stroke' panel. Like you mentioned, 'stroke' and 'fill' are 2 concepts, but controlled via 3 panels. :) Somehow my feeble brain refuses to accept that and play along. :)
Well that's the thing: any given vector object has two color properties. How to present this fact to the user is tricky at best. I don't have a solution, but think that a combined "Appearance" panel would make Inkscape easier to work with. Changing F/S should be one of the easiest/quickest operations in Inkscape. The current tabs involve too much clicking IMO.
I've been racking my brain for a better representation of F/S (as opposed to the AI method), but like I said before it's quite tricky.
Yes, it is quite tricky. Color control is one of the core functionalities of Inkscape and the approach should be unified throughout the GUI. I believe that the 'trickiness' to solve the problem comes mainly from the fact that the 'Stroke color' and 'Fill color' are abstract entities with no analogy in the real world. When we draw or paint using the natural media, we have a color marker or a pencil in our hands and there are no 'stroke' and the 'outline' colors! It only depends how we apply that tool on the surface. Sometimes to outline something, and sometimes to fill some shape. As it is, for now, we don't have such a simplistic luxury in digital media. So, we have to come up with new metaphors. If you take a look at the 'stroke' and 'fill' tabs now, you will see that there are separate color mixers and pickers. That is not common in natural media, but in digital media it is acceptable, with no major issues, I think.
There are many directions for the brainstorm on untangling this trickiness you mentioned, I think. For example: - 'natural analogy'... i.e. What is happening in the real world when we deal with color? - 'direct manipulation'... i.e. Can we just ignore the panels and manage the color directly, on object? - 'color as metadata'... i.e. Treating color as a 'tag' that can be stuck on any object. Even several of them, and then just selecting the one we like? - You come up with some more... ;)
btw, I have been working on my own, on a concept for a fundamentally different approach to graphic app paradigm. But I am not sure if it would be coherent at all with the Inkscape's paradigm, but if anyone's interested I will be more than happy to share some thoughts, maybe you could find a way to fuse it, or just give me a reality check. ;)
Now all that being said the AI UI is pretty rotten. Things are very, very cramped - I would say they have the opposite problem compared with Inkscape: instead of huge dialogs eating up tons of space, they've packed so much into a small area it can be quite painful to access what you want (stroke options for example, grr...). I hope there is some middle ground in there somewhere!
:) Yup! They have Featuritis + micropsia.
Actually, I think that Inkscape has many, many unmatched nice-and-motherly-fuzzy-kind UI goodies. Color mixing, snaps, the new node editing, precision, extensions, the whole path operations thingy... I think they are all superb. They do need sometimes some lovin' and some 'visual pattern language' cleaning (a big topic) would be good, too.
Lastly I think this is more useful discussion than holy war and I'd like to thank everyone who's chimed in thus far. But hey, feel free to flame me to a crisp - no worries ;)
Same here! What he said! :)
PS - should we stay with a tabbed F/S would it be feasible/practical to have 3 keys dedicated to Fill, Stroke Paint and Stroke Style tabs, or perhaps one to cycle them?
I would say 2 tabs would be a good fix for now and maybe a cycle key for that. Cycling using keys when there's more than 2 possible states would probably be a bad practice. In practice, we somehow always press that cycle-key too many times, and you end up at one state after the one you needed. And then you have to cycle it again. Can be frustrating. :)
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Cheers,
Alex