On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 02:10:39PM +0100, Maximilian Albert wrote:
unfortunately I haven't yet received any response to my other emails, so I don't know if there is a potential mentor for any of them or if they are suitable for a SoC project at all.
I'm sure it's just that people are just overwhelmed by the sudden rush of great ideas being posted. :-)
I personally won't be mentoring this time around (I'm going to be limited in my time again this year, and want to focus into the 0.47 release, drupal, and if I have extra time refactoring), but I absolutely love the idea of adding technical drawing capabilities to Inkscape so will try to give you some comments on this one.
In any case, I have written up some thoughts regarding the facilitation of geometric constructions/tech drawing in Inkscape. They can be found here:
I wonder if perhaps some of the underlying geometrical math for this is provided by 2geom? If you haven't already, I'd recommend investigating this, and outlining how 2geom fits into the picture (esp. if there is missing functionality that'd need added to 2geom.)
I would suggest starting with the straight line constructions - parallel, perpendicular, angular constraints, etc. These are very basic and will have general utility beyond technical drawing. I also suspect getting the UI right for this will require some experimentation.
For circles, I'd suggest a different UI approach. Defining points and then inserting a shape is a standard UI technique for CAD tools, but for inkscape I think it'd fit better to use a UI style more like stars or rounded rectangles: With those, you draw a rough version of the shape and then use the "handles" to adjust the corner radius or star spokes. Similarly, with this circle, you'd have three handles which could be moved (and maybe snapped to intersections, lines, etc.) to adjust the radius.
Along these lines, it'd be nice to have a "center point and radius" style for circles. In tech drawing you're often needing to put circles at intersections of lines, or end points of lines, or tangential to lines, so being able to place or snap the center point and a radius would serve the purpose here.
Another useful function would be able to snap a circle tangential to a line (for some reason I thought this could be done already, but I'm not able to get it to do it - maybe it's just broken?)
Note that there is already a 'measure path' effect, under Effects > Visualize Path > Measure Path. It does not do point-to-point measure, but does create a nice text label and allow for selecting units.
Hope this helps, Bryce