On 4/11/07, jiho <jo.irisson@...400...> wrote:
It looks really great indeed, very creative, and the kind of feature once probably can't find in other software. Just out of curiosity: how did the idea occured to you? You needed to do some engraving like work and could not find a good tool for it? You just thought it would be "cool"?
I just always loved old books :)
I think with computers, we have lost way too many capabilities and techniques that were taken for granted centuries ago. Of course many of them were originally just workarounds - for example, engravings were used not because of their look but because there was no other way to reproduce a halftone image. But on top of that practical need, they did look absolutely unique, and it's a shame that, apart from Inkscape, no modern software (to my knowledge) even considers this technique as a legitimate need of an artist.
We have simplified things a lot, and lost a lot in this simplification. Even the supposedly all-powerful TeX cannot reproduce, for example, some of the typesetting tricks that were common in old dictionaries.
In part, this is because until recently, computers were too weak to adequately reproduce the complex, feedback-driven traditional techniques where each step affects all subsequent steps. But in a larger part, I think, it's because modern computer programmers are too mathematically minded and too prone to equate correctness with simplicity. They always try to find a single elegant formula that will magically solve all cases. Which sometimes gives excellent results - but sometimes, results in programs that behave too clumsily and mechanically to be enjoyable.
I love math, too. But I'm not obsessed with it. If I feel that some ad-hoc, highly empirical coefficient can improve the subjective behavior of a tool, I add it without hesitation, even if the result will make a mathematician cringe.
As a result, I also like to consider problems that obviously have no simple mathematical solution and therefore escape the attention of more mathematically-minded developers. For example, it is quite obvious that at this time, it is impossible to create a fully automatic filter that would magically turn any halftone image into a decent-looking line engraving; this requires a level of AI beyond what is available these days. But I didn't stop at this realization - and just tried to think up some automatic tools that could make this, still largely manual, work easier.