On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:27:21 -0700 From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Inkscape is a vector graphics editor inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Multi-page UI (was: Dockable dialogs, and some concerns...)
On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 03:17:38AM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
On Mar 26, 2007, at 5:02 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Anyway, it seems there's a number of approaches for handling multiple pages that don't rely on tabs,
So something like a pages dialog as there is a layers dialog, or I suppose things could end up rather resembling an Integrated development enviroment like Anjuta?
Well, like I think I said, I suspect the ideal approach would be for the primary nagivation to be in-canvas. So instead of just seeing the outline of a single page when you pull up Inkscape, you'd see several adjacent page outlines, and would simply pan or scroll around to see the other pages.
Laser printers can print very close to the edge of a page, home inkjet printers dont even come close. The concept of page can get a bit weird and surprising for users, and most people end up wasting a bunch of paper.
Maybe part of my difficulty with this is the existing page concept in inskape on on hand has a sort of infinite canvas and then only part of that is intended as a printable page. There is was a trick/habit in Macromedia flash to use the off page areas as kind of a scap area (and it is a habit I think inkscape users might be taking advantage of) but when you go and put individual pages right beside each other that work habit is not an option.
Users however (as can be seen from bug reports) are certainly expecting the different kinds of layouts you speak of, some of which could be handled simply by better print control fitting the drawing to the desired pages, not necessarily needing to setup all that information in program in advance.
documents open at once. I would not be so enthusiastic, Tabbed MDI is better than MDI but it still has many of the same problems of MDI.
Actually you misread me. I currently favor staying with the current SDI style, dislike MDI, and am neutral with regards to a tabbed UI. However, realistically I know that given the strong interest in a multi-document UI, it's likely if someone codes it up with tabs, the patch is going to be accepted. So in practicality I think an optional tabbed UI could be the ideal compromise, especially if it doesn't prohibit using it in an SDI style with floating dialogs.
(Honestly, I think given the size of our userbase, were we to switch to a tabbed-only UI, we'd have a very vocal minority on our hands. We would best introduce tabbed UI as an opt-in thing people can turn on ala Firefox.)
Yeah I'm a big sceptic of Tabs and that puts me out of the mainstream. Sure they get the job done but Window and document workflow management is still a great big mess of a problem.
IIRC, one of Jon Cruz' salient points is that window management (and, as a consequence, document workflow management) is something we ought to expect the _window manager_ to be solving.
Except unfortunately we have windows users, and to a lesser extent Mac and Gnome users who aren't going to be tweaking things much eathier so applicatoins cannot abdicate responsibility much as we might like to.
Addressing it at the application layer through things like MDI is kludging around inadequacies in window managers. And this is a whole other can of worms. ;-)
can open, worms everywhere.
So best I think we can do is make things as generic and flexible as possible, and enable as many different workflows as possible.
... which without enough restraint gives us an airplane cockpit user interface with a baffling number of choices. Realistically though I'd guess Inkscape to err more on the side of providing the option (like KDE) than leaving it out so users dont get confused or shoot themselves in the foot (the Gnome approach, which I think anyone doing tech support will thank you for, not yet a huge contstrain of inkscape but we have a fair few Frequently Asked Questions).