On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 07:58 +1200, Bryan Hoyt | Brush Technology wrote:
PS. Is it OK on this list to put my 2c in on things like this when I'm not actually involved in development? Let me know if I'm just getting in the way of a well-oiled process (http://yellow.bikeshed.com/)
Of course. I think that one of the things that makes Inkscape strong is real users giving opinions and use cases on the mailing list. But, be prepared to defend them! :)
Fewer options is not almost always better. Fewer options is almost always more limiting for some group of users.Ok, point taken -- although I think care needs to be taken not to build so many extra options in (just in case someone wants it) that it becomes a) very difficult for new users to discover features, because there's so much less-than-useful stuff to scan through, and b) very hard for new & old users to find anything (think MS Word, which has so many, albeit useful, menu items that you can find your favorite feature more quickly by doing a web search than by scanning through all the menus/prefs)
I think that one of the things we suffer from is having too many settings. And part of that is that we don't have a good separation between advanced settings and things you're likely to want to change. I already find the preferences dialog daunting. That being said...
Either way, I think it would be useful to have a more concrete use-case than "I bet there are people who would want the old orientation back" before adding a preference for something. Bulia, do you have any use-cases or actual people in mind for this preference?
Yeah, different types of drawing have vastly different traditions. It's hard to follow things like manuals and tutorials on design if you can't match their origin. I've personally had every set of I could think of suggested for where Inkscape should put the origin. People with a math background tend to like it on the bottom left so all the numbers are "positive" in their book. Computer graphics people like it in the upper left because that's how monitors scan (or used to, in some cases today). Print is typically bottom left.
I think that there's enough different traditions here to warrant a preference unless we're going to only support one type of artist (which I don't believe we want to do). Though, I do believe it should be a document preference not a global one.
--Ted