On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 07:06:09PM +0200, Maximilian Albert wrote:
Hi,
I just committed to SVN a proof-of-concept "tech drawing LPE" wich allows constructing a circle with adjustable center and radius. Apply it to any path and it will draw a circle whose center is the starting point and whose circumference passes through the end point of this path (intermediate points will be ignored). Dragging the points of the original path will make the circle move/resize accordingly.
(Aside: Despite my current time constraints I just couldn't help giving this a try since the LPE aproach sounded so tempting. @Johan: This is nothing short of awesome!! Your framework is sooo easy to use and a pleasure to work with.)
The good news is: This shows that my tech drawing proposal is absolutely accomplishable. However, now that I have seen how easy to do it actually is I almost feel ashamed for proposing this as a whole GSoC project. ;-) I coded this in a few hours, and most of the work was actually wading through the 2geom Path class definitions in order to find out how it works. So the various constructions I propose in [1] should be implementable within a week or so (say 2 weeks for other ones that pop up as desired).
Whoa, that's awesome. Very glad to hear it was so easy to do, and that this could allow a broader range of features to be attempted.
On the other hand, special care must be taken in the implementation of an intuitive and easy-to-use yet powerful user interface. I suppose that this may in fact require the bulk of the coding time since we have to provide a linkage between on-canvas actions and LPE parameters. Telling from the other LPE files there seems to be basic support for this but I guess it would have to be considerably expanded and unified.
I suspected this may be the case. But I think it would be time very well invested. Inkscape built a lot of success on top of simply having a convenient and intuitive UI for editing nodes. Having a convenient and intuitive UI for doing these extremely basic tech drawing functionalities could give us a powerful foundation to build on.
Still, even if I anticipate a whole month for the UI work I'm concerned that this is overall too easy a project to propose for GSoC. On the other hand, according to the following thread on the GSoC mailing list:
it would be possible to change the project even after the end of the application period (in case a student is chosen and the mentoring organization agrees). So would it be an option for me to finish my application for the tech drawing project but during SoC actually work on the 3D features which I proposed in a separate thread? I have a first draft for such a proposal, too, but am concerned it will not get finished in time for the application deadline.
Any comments from possible mentors?
Perhaps organize your proposal into 3 phases, one being the core basic stuff, second being a follow-on advanced functionality phase, and third being some optional stretch goals (such as the 3D tools).
Here are some additional technical drawing objectives that may be appropriate for the advanced functionality phase:
* Superset xfig functionality. xfig is an extremely old drawing tool, that most people consider to be obsoleted by inkscape, however xfig still has some technical drawing capabilities we don't. E.g.: - Measure Angle - Measure Length (we have this as an extension) - Measure Area - Add Tangent/Normal to curve
* Markers (arrowheads) improvements (something forever on my todo list) - Change marker color - Change marker point alignment - Additional improvements
* Document units scaling. So can specify that 1cm in document represents 500m. Necessary for doing scale drawing.
* Direct data entry - to make it easier to type in the x,y values of drawing elements.
And of course launchpad is full of other ideas. I think the above would address a pretty huge chunk of the most popular requests. If we had all of the above, Inkscape would become a quite convenient technical drawing tool.
Bryce