bulia byak wrote:
OK, I downloaded and installed PyXML 0.8.4 from python.org and now it works. For some reason Mandrake's PyXML didn't have xpath.
Good. I thought it might be a bad sign that xpath was in the xmlplus directory.
Here are my thoughts on the extensions now that I tried them:
All extensions open a new window for the result. I understand it may be difficult to implement it differently, but it's really clumsy this way. Is the author supposed to close the original and save the new window overwriting the original file? This is a messy and dangerous operation. I think more sensible is to treat the new window as a "preview" and to copy/paste the result from it to the original window, if it is satisfactory. I think that's what most people will do anyway.
So, in order to make this easier:
- if an extension works with selection, the output should contain only
that selection with the selection applied and nothing else;
- if the extension creates a new object, it should not copy anything
from the original at all, just create a new document with that new object;
- on load, the new document should at least be centered, and ideally
zoomed into, the object it has;
- it may also have some sort of text saying "Use copy and paste to
move this to the original window".
What do you think?
I personally would much rather wait for effects to be implemented properly. By that I mean that they affect the document in the user's window preserving the name and undo, etc. Anything else will be clumsy. I think your suggestion is workable but only temporarily. Implementing it would be too much of a burden both on you inkscape developers and script authors. And in the end I don't think it will make users very happy. I think that time would be better spent learning how to keep the document in the same window. Ted, Bryce or someone else who is aquainted with the code should comment.
Aaron Spike