On 2008-March-15 , at 01:11 , bulia byak wrote:
On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 6:46 PM, jiho <jo.irisson@...400...> wrote:
BTW, regarding saving in other vector formats, if those become Cairo based, they will probably all offer the same functionality. Said functionality is approaching the one for bitmap export thanks to your recent changes (export only one object, all drawing regardless of page size). So would it be possible to uniformize things a little and move all lossy export solutions (i.e. everything that's not SVG in fact...) to a single export command and dialog? There were several discussions already and the bottom line (one of the bottom lines at least ;)) was that, while the functionality of bitmap and vector exports were not approximately on par, it was not a good idea to put them together. Now that they are it would, IMHO, make more sense. There is a (long) launchpad bug about this https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/168627
Of course. So, will anyone complain if I just add a little format drop-down (PNG, PS, EPS, PDF) to the Export Bitmap dialog, and rename it to e.g. "Export objects"? We won't even need to gray out anything there for PS/PDF export because bitmap resolution makes sense for them as well, for the filtered objects that will need to be rasterized.
great! Some things may need to be tweaked though since a quick review of the current functionality shows: Bitmap PDF ------------------------------------------------ page <-> page drawing <-> drawing selection+hide <-> by ID selection-hide <-> no equivalent (could be achieved by clipping though, or setting a crop box in the pdf) custom <-> no equivalent (idem) (see http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/test-export.zip for an illustrated version)
(BTW, while you're at it, don't you think it would make sense to suppress the x0/1 y0/1 width and height fields in the bitmap export dialog for all settings that are not the "custom" one, and to set the default in the custom one to the full page when nothing is selected and to the bounding box of the selected objects when something is? There will be no loss in functionality and the dialog will be made simpler and smaller this way).
The Adobe formats will still remain in the Save dialog, because a lot of people will still look for them there, although I think we need them to work as if it was "Save a copy", i.e. without Inkscape suddenly deciding that it has a PDF document loaded. Will this satisfy everyone?
Having "Save as" do something different with current document depending on which format is chosen looks like potentially confusing UI to me. You could probably disable PDF/PS/... altogether in "Save" and "Save as" and only leave them in "Save as copy". But don't you think people will naturally look in "export" if they don't find a specific format in "Save as"? Speaking of what I know, this is the paradigm on OS X: save and save as often do not even provide a format chooser (they save in the native format of the application) and all the rest is under export. To summarise, the simplest and more robust UI (from an user point of view, and in my very humble opinion) would be:
Save Save as -> Inkscape SVG, Inkscape SVGZ, Compressed Inkscape SVG width media (possibly also SVG, and SVGZ but they are still lossy afterall) Export -> Everything else with such a dialog: a file chooser at the top, and file type defaulting to "Guess from extension". batch export all selected object check box * four tabs underneath (Page, Drawing, Objects, Custom)** depending on the file type, enable or disable batch export when batch export is unchecked/unavailable, enable or disable each tab depending on the file type PNG: enable all PDF/PS/EPS: enable page, drawing, objects other graphic formats: enable page or drawing depending on the behaviour of the file type other formats (GPL): disable all
* To simplify matters, if batch export is restricted to PNG, it could be made a separate menu entry in the file menu Indeed, there is very little user interaction left in the dialog when it is checked (basically one can only click "Export") so it may be more efficiently done in one action (File > Batch export to bitmap) instead of three (File > Export bitmap, tick batch export, Click export). With SHIFT+ALT +CTRL+E as keyboard shortcut and a discardable nag screen about the fact that it overwrites previous files it seems like a good solution to me.
** Selection becomes Objects and exports only selected objects (as with "hide all excpet selected objects" now). Custom behaves by default as "Selection" does now: the coordinates are the one of current selection and, when only one object is selected, the filename to which it is saved is saved in the SVG. When coordinates are changed manually and it reverts to how custom works currently. Does that make sense? Another solution would be to have Page, Drawing, Object, Selection/Selected area, Custom but it would make the dialog bigger.
There's only one problem: since PS/PDF/etc export is all via extensions, how can I call an extension without it showing its setup dialog? I will need to add quite a number of new parameters to these extensions, and they will be rather technical in nature, not quite suitable for UI. This is already a problem with the "export object with this ID" in the dialog instead of a simple "export selection" checkbox, but I cannot do this because the dialog is created by the extension itself and I cannot control it. So, can I suppress it entirely and pass all parameters from the more user-friendly "export objects" dialog?
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/