On 10-Mar-2013 00:18, Martin Owens wrote:
On Fri, 2013-03-08 at 18:15 +0000, John Cliff wrote:
we import/translate them into an svg with varying levels of success. likewise, we can only save an svg, anything else is an export with a varying level of compatability.
Does this mean we want inport to not insert into the current document, but open non-svg formats in a new document?
Since you brought up the insert issue...
Currently "Open" creates a new document for the file and "Import" places it in the foreground document. In many applications there is no "Import", or it is the complement of the sort of "Export" which is being discussed here. In my experience what Inkscape currently calls "Import" is more often called "Insert" in other programs, sometimes even as a top level menu. For instance, PowerPoint is that way.
In trunk under the file menu there are (many others left off)
Open Open Recent... Revert -------------------- Import Export to PNG Import Clip Art
The bottom 3 each have a little icon and an arrow to indicate direction. If I were setting it up from scratch I would have used Insert instead of Import, but since it has been Import for a while, and the meanings are fairly close there isn't a compelling reason to change it. Anyway, with "Import's" current meaning, by symmetry the file menu is missing
Import Recent...
but why should the "recent" list only apply to input? Why not also:
Save to Recent... Save a copy to Recent...
?
Implementation would not be hard, but nobody wants all 4 of those on the file menu, they would take up too much space. Seems like the sort of case where the options should be hidden in a submenu. This suggests using the more general single entry:
File->Recent Files...
which would bring up the submenu options: Open, Import, Save, Save a copy. (Maybe Save as... too? Probably only rarely used because the name sets the type, but it could be employed to change an existing file from Inkscape SVG to plain SVG, or vice versa, where the type is ambiguous.) Below each of these submenu options would be the same pull down list of file names as "Open Recent..." currently shows. The Inkscape menu system already has submenu items, like Object->Clip, so using a submenu here would not be introducing a new GUI element.
This change might be useful to a lot of users. For instance, in my work there are often lots of files in a directory, so "Open" or "Save as..." (if a file is to be overwritten) involves a lot of scrolling and clicking to find the right file. With File->Recent->Open/Save the list of files to select from would be much shorter. In other words, it should reduce clicks and mousing and make using the program more efficient.
Regards,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech