On 29/3/11 06:52, Mark Schafer wrote:
I have had difficulty understanding what some of the extensions do and in writing my own I have discovered the notebook tab. I want to suggest using the notebook tab at the top of each extension to help document how they work. Here is a screenshot of a suggested UI from my Lasercut box extension. http://www.flickr.com/photos/33807726@...2603.../5569339514/ Extra tabs could break up the info for clarity and show data like author,url, etc
IMHO dialogs this high (as seen in the screenshot) are hard to use (or unusable) on smaller screens (laptop) - did you take a look at e.g. 'Render > Function Plotter', 'Render > Parametric Curves', 'Render > L-System' or 'Visualize Path > Measure Path' for how they handle documentation? The pages of the notebook are actual tabs, not just a frame within the same dialog.
As far as I know, in the current development branch (lp:inkscape), which has seen several UI consistency updates (units, Gnome HIG compliance...) to many of the bundled extensions, help texts for some other extensions have been added or moved to a separate notebook page/tab (e.g. 'Color > Custom', 'Color > Randomize' or 'Generate from Path > Voronoi Pattern').
The externally developed 'JessyInk' extension (bundled with Inkscape 0.48) is another example to use a second tab for the help text in each of its dialogs.
I'm sure JazzyNico will provide further details, since he has been working on improving and extending the available GUI elements for the extension dialogs lately.
So I propose:
- supply a template for people writing extensions to use as a starter
- and some docs/tutorials on making extensions in python
There are several pages with information about the extension subsystem, creating INX files and script extensions in the wiki (some of them might be slightly outdated): http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Extensions
~suv