On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 04:41:08AM -0400, bulia byak wrote:
In a lot of respects, page and pageSet containers are similar to groups or layers.
[Ignoring underlying implementation details and focusing on UI as per earlier email...]
- Reuse the Layers dialog for displaying and switching these page
containers as well, making them part of the overall layers tree displayed in that dialog. In this way, each page may have its own subtree of layers, but there may be shared layers that show up on all pages, stored in master pages or in the content before the pageSet (which is also treated as a background master page). Of course the Layers dialog will have to treat such page-layers in a special way, namely:
It might be nice to have a way for the most common operations to be done entirely in-cavas rather than having to go to a dialog, so here's one rough idea...
A "document" is composed of sequence of pages with optional background and overlay. In the canvas this could look like:
+--+ +--+ |B1| |p1| +--+ +--+ +--+ |p2| +--+ +--+ |p3| +--+ +--+ +--+ +--+ |B2| |p4| |OL| +--+ +--+ +--+ +--+ |p5| +--+ .... : : ....
Or in Document Preferences the user can choose to have it run left to right (or whatever), so simply rotate the above diagram 90 degrees.
To add page 6, one would drag some elements from p5 down to the hidden area below p5, and the page is automatically added to the document.
(For adding a page inside a sequence, maybe allow right clicking in the space between pages?? Not sure.)
The last page in the document sequence can be automatically deleted by removing all elements on it.
Similarly, new backgrounds or overlays can be created by dragging some elements to the left or right of the document, and removed by dragging the elements off. [The areas to the left and right of the background and overlay pages are 'scratch' areas similar to the left and right of the page boundaries in single-page mode.]
To delete a page inside a sequence, or add a bunch of pages at once, or move pages, or other more complex things, use the dialog. (Maybe there are in-canvas ways of doing intuitive UI for these, but no ideas come to mind.)
It might be nice to enable the user to do X-by-Y multi-page drawings, by configuring in Document Preferences the # pages in both dimensions. For instance, a 3x2 drawing, with no overlay or background, and "no page spacing":
+--+--+--+ |p1|p2|p3| +--+--+--+ |p4|p5|p6| +--+--+--+
Obviously this also opens questions about crop marks, margins, and so forth. Could be complex, but for multi-page drawing could be extraordinarily useful.
The inverse of this is the "labels and business cards" scenario, where you have multiple documents printed on a single page. (I ran into this just recently when my fiancee and I tried printing seating cards in Open Office, and it frustrated us to tears. This seems like a use case well within Inkscape's potential. I mention it only because a sufficiently generalized multi-page document UI might be able to cover this use case as well.
Bryce