2013/4/23 Jan Darowski <jan.darowski@...400...>:
And here are the the questions for you guys:
- Is it still as important idea as I think? Maybe there is something more
urgent what you can suggest to me?
'New from template' would still be useful.
- As the ideas blueprint suggests
(https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/new-from-3. template-dialog) there has been some work done about this idea but I cannot find anything about what has been done and where it is.
It doesn't seem like anything useful has been published yet, so I think it would be best to start from scratch.
- Is there any support for the procedural templates written? That's another
mentioned functionality I cannot find. Is it so important? Without very deep research in this direction I think It can require a lot of work to do it from the beginning. Maybe even to much as for the GSoC, as there are also other things to be done during this period.
Procedural templates is basically *the* reason to have this dialog at all.
A procedural template should just be a special Python extension. Most of the infrastructure, including automatically creating a dialog from an XML description of the parameters, is already in place within the extension system. You would just need to add some special cases and wire it to a separate dialog. It would be nice if you could also do some cleanup along the way.
As for now, I'm thinking about focusing on making a simple dialog, which covers current functionality + searching by tags + categorizing templates (things from wiki http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/NewFromTemplateSpec). As there will be a nice "New From Template" dialog, maybe I should also add one for creating templates? It shouldn't be very difficult, just another type of save dialog, with some additional template-specific fields and adding them into svg file.
I think just searching and tagging is too little for GSoC - this kind of dialog could be written in about 2 weeks. If you added procedural templates to the goals, the scope would be OK.
Note that the mockups on the wiki aren't very good. In particular, the two lists (categories and templates) take too much space. IMO, categories are not necessary if there are keywords. There should just be a flat list of templates, a search box and a view of the currently selected template, which should have two tabs: "template" and "information". The first tab would have only the drawing / preview of the template and controls for its parameters, while the second tab would list author information, keywords, detailed description of use, etc. - more or less the things in the "Tag / Value" list view in the first mockup.
Regards, Krzysztof