Dear developers,
I've just completed a section of work which you can find here:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/merge_requests/15
I'd appreciate a good review of the code, especially for things like memory leaks which I'm particularly weak on. A second point is the removal of ifdefs, which I can't rally do with resource files, but I'm hopping it won't matter (famous last words).
I wanted to bring up to the whole community my plans going forward. You can see how I've moved the toolbar user interface XML from being compiled in, to being a file in share/ui.
The reason for this, is I want to encourage experimentation on inkscape's user interface, which we can't do at the moment without recompiling the program.
With this change, it looks for the ui files, not just in /usr/share/inkscape/ui, but also ~/.config/inkscape/ui so users can generate a set of custom files with their own toolbar buttons ordered the way that they want. It's not a lot of customisation, but it's something to get going with.
The future vision is to start pulling some of the complex cruddy widget creation code out and putting that into a meater ui file. I might start with some dialogs like the document properties dialog. These are more interesting, because they have things like signals and anyone editing them needs to be very careful.
But if we have good code that has some good error messages and such, a designer could open the ui file in glade and mess about with the widget locations, paddings and a bunch of other visual pieces.
What are all your thoughts?
Best Regards, Martin Owens