I absolutely despise the fill/stroke switcher concept. Fill and stroke, while similar, are two entirely separate things. I don't think it makes any sense for them to share the same space. It's really unintuitive, in my opinion. (I don't think I can express my dislike strongly enough without cursing ;) It took me a good bit of time just to figure that out, and have yet to get used to it after several months of active use.
Joshua, some of us just do vector design for many years, using all possible graphic design software (including Flash) - in all possible OS-es. I do icon design, logo design, vector portraits & heraldic symbols, website UI, software GUI, banners, books, magazines, journals, packages, frame-by-frame flash movies, etc. and I consider I have enough experience (I cross thru a lot of very specific situations) so I can value this change as positive.
You say you are not ignorant but you just ignore that fact that you don't cross thru all possible design situations yet - in some situations you will need this 1 or 2 clicks economy (for example when you work on complex graphics with multiple layers with many small shapes in a small area) more than you need air. You will feel that.
If you have just few shapes and few points ans also you have time enough ..all OK, ..no question ask. But when you have do modify thousands of shapes / day you will appreciate a click less / operation, so they discuss here not about if panel should be changed - but how the workflow can be improved without introducing more complexity.
Oliver Jan Krylow mock-up also put the stroke controls on the same tab with Colors control and this is a plus over actual panel, because reduce the Stroke Style tab (a click less), facilitating a direct view and access to the Shape style controls.
Now the problem is how to deal with the switcher button (F/S). In the case when Inkscape don't have a very specific Line / Shape selector tool (just a node tool) AND that panel will integrate the stroke control tools as in Oliver mockup, then we can have the same functionality (switching between Fill and Stroke fill) using tabs / radio buttons / simply buttons. A new control like GIMP FG/BG widget for F/S switch probably will introduce a new complexity. All in all, the integration of Shape styles in this panel is a good step forward.
2010/9/3 Joshua Facemyer <jfacemyer@...400...>:
I just don't get how it's so much less work - I'm not ignorant by any means, and I easily learn new software, so I'm pretty sure that I haven't missed much. But I haven't found Inkscape to be any more cumbersome to use Fill and Stroke. Quite the opposite.
(BTW, the reason I don't generally use tutorials is that I figure things out very quickly and only need to look up a few tricky parts here and there - the fact that this had me baffled, for however short a time, does not have me convinced that Adobe should be mimicked in this regard
- certainly wasn't user friendly, as far as I am concerned.)
Additionally (on a related note), selecting colors in Inkscape is vastly easier, in my opinion, than in Adobeware. (I'm looking forward to improved swatching, however, in Inkscape.)
If keyboard shortcuts are the only thing you're saying is better, why don't we just add similar shortcuts? Or maybe do it better(er) somehow?
My intention is not to start a flame war - simply to strongly urge that we don't go that direction, because there has got to be a better way, even if we just adapt what we already have.
JF
On 09/02/2010 05:49 PM, Chris Mohler wrote:
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Joshua Facemyer<jfacemyer@...400...> wrote:
I wish to strongly disagree about combining the fill and stroke dialogs. I recently started to use a "professional" proprietary software suite for a new job (no choice for me) and have had to learn the interface, some elements which this mockup is trying to imitate.
You can Adobe-bash all you want to but the Fill-Stroke in Illustrator is vastly easier to use than current Inkscape. The rest of the interface might in fact be a nightmare, but:
'x' key - toggle fill/stroke active 'X' key - switch fill/stroke '/' key - remove either fill or stroke (whichever is active) Perhaps these keys will help you with your new job ;) Also lynda.com offers pretty good (paid) tutorials on AI, and there are tons of free ones out there.
Not to mention AI F/S parallels the FG/BG concept used by GIMP, Photoshop, et al.
Don't get me wrong - Inkscape does quite a few things better than AI. However, F/S is not one of them, Way, way too many steps involved to manage the appearance of an object. All IMO of course :)
Chris
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