bulia byak wrote:
On 10/22/07, Joshua Facemyer <faceman@...1574...> wrote:
I always understood the infobar opacity to affect all selected objects. If this is true (and the intention is to keep it so), could it not simply be renamed "Selection Opacity" to make sure it's not confused with the fill or stroke opacity?
No need for "selection". Almost everything in Inkscape is "selection", so it's redundant. Just "opacity".
But the alpha controls for fill and stroke affect only that part of the selection, so it makes a difference that you know whether you're affecting the opacity of the object or its fill/stroke. I realize that it is fairly intuitive to assume that "opacity" would affect the selection and that the fill part of the selection should have a more particular designation, but that's not necessarily perfectly obvious to everyone.
Maybe then the "Master Opacity" slider in the F&S dialog can be removed (since it isn't directly dealing with the fill or stroke properties of anything, necessarily), and a slider place in the infobar by the "Selection Opacity".
What is "infobar"? Controls bar of some specific tool? But this needs to be accessible in all tools. The O: control in statusbar works most of the time, the only problem with it is that it's not easily draggable, so that's why we also have a slider. I agree that "fill and stroke" is not the most logical place for it but others seem worse.
Sorry, statusbar is what I meant. Then it would be available to all tools, and you wouldn't have to open a dialog for it. If you're going to have a control down there anyway, might as well make it really easy to use and put in a slider. I don't think that idea sounds worse at all :)
I think it makes sense to have the alpha preview for a gradient stop; I don't think it makes sense to use the fill and stroke tabs to adjust gradient stop colors.
If it doesn't make sense to you, don't use it :) Use any other method of setting color. They all work the same. For example clicking on the palette.
But it's not consistent, since they are labelled "fill" and "stroke" and you're editing a "stop" color.
That's really confusing, especially when you see both are available while you have a stop selected, and either can be used to affect the color, and on top of that you can still edit stroke style for the whole object without leaving the gradient stop selection. Hmm...
Perhaps just disable most of the dialog when gradient stop is selected
- but I don't think it's very useful. Although we should probably
disable some parts of it - blur slider and fill/stroke opacity for one.
I think that would be better than it is now, anyways.
I think the dialog should change from the 3-tab to the gradient editor
Not to "gradient editor" but to something like "color editor". But I really don't think we need to go that far. Undisabled things still apply to the entire object and they still make sense when you select a stop.
What I'm saying is to disable the Fill and Stroke widgets, since they don't apply to the entire object. Otherwise, if you don't want to disable them, they should act the same way they do when you have the object selected instead of a stop - change the color for the fill of the object or the stroke of the object, not a stop of a gradient. I'd be fine with a simple "color editor" as you suggest (although I don't see a reason not to put the gradient editor there), but it should not be able to be confused with the controls for editing the fill or the stroke colors.
That would be much more consistent. Maybe add the gradient editor dialog as a 4th tab?
No, that would be even less logical than it is now.
Why? It would be less logical in the sense that gradients are separate entities from objects (from a programming point of view), but if you rename the whole dialog to "properties", as you mention below, then it would make sense that you could edit properties of gradients and their stops there too, especially since it's the same place you edit object colors, which are very closely related to other object fills.
(Incidentally, why does the Stroke Style tab only get greyed out when it can't be used, instead of blanked like the other two tabs?)
Because you can't create stroke just by setting width - you need to set color first which is done on another tab.
So why does it matter if you can see the controls at all, if you can't use them anyways? No big deal, just curious.
Opacity" label. I think the current setup makes a lot of sense, once the ambiguity of the opacity slider in the F&S dialog is taken care of. (Similarly, the blur slider doesn't make a whole lot of sense there anymore, now that we have other filters, and it doesn't affect either fill or stroke separately.
I disagree. I'd rather rename the dialog instead to something like "properties". Blur is a fundamental property and needs to be adjustable directly and easily, not via some cumbersome "filters".
I think the issue is really with making everything present in the F&S dialog deal with either the fill or the stroke, depending on which tab is selected.)
Note that opacity and blur are NOT on either fill or stroke tabs, it's below them. So the only inconsistency is with the title of the dialog; if you ignore it, it makes perfect sense.
Well, if that's the case, then it should be done, considering that users need the application UI to make sense without having to ignoring parts of it :)
Even still, I think my suggestion about putting the selection opacity completely on the status bar would improve usability and intuitive usefulness greatly. Maybe even the blur could go there too.
JF