[resend - accidentally sent off-list]
2014-03-10 13:23 GMT+01:00 Tomasz Boczkowski <penginsbacon@...400...>:
Hi!
My name is Tomasz Boczkowski. I would like to apply for GSOC 2014 and spend this summer coding Inkscape.
I have an idea to revamp the pattern UI, currently being part of the Fill and Stroke dialog. It would consist of a new "patterns" dialog and a new on-canvas tool to edit patterns. The file new_patterns_ui.svg [2] contains my first draft, how the improved UI could look like.
Some comments on the UI mockup: 1. "Contour" should be "stroke" 2. The palette behavior should be reused in this dialog. Normal click should apply the pattern to fill and Shift-click should apply to stroke. 3. The way the pattern icons are supposed to "jump" when one of them is selected is very bad. 4. What is the purpose of the "transform" button? The pattern transform is specified on the object, not on the pattern, and is already editable on the canvas. This looks like a mistake. 5. I think it would be more sensible to embed the pattern preview and chooser into the existing fill and stroke dialog.
The new dialog would provide a way to browse, manage and apply patterns. Some basic support for grouping patterns into collections would be provided. By dragging a pattern and dropping it on an svg object or on Fill and Stroke dialog, a user could apply it. After dropping a pattern on empty canvas, a new object could be created. It would look like a mini-page and have the size of pattern. Any objects inside this object would be treated as pattern child elements. That would allow live modifications to existing patterns.
How would this "new object" be represented at the XML level?
I'm not convinced that this is the way to go. However, we definitely need a new UI concept for editing distinct "areas" of the document (e.g. separate pages, patterns, masks, and so on). It would be ideal if the concept you invent could eventually be reused for the other use cases.
An alternative to "patterns" dialog would be to implement a general "print servers" dialog, enabling to manage, besides patterns, named colors, gradients and hatches. The alternative is also enclosed in mockup drawing. I suppose I would be able to implement support for selected print servers only (eg. named colors + patterns) in GSOC timeframe.
"Paint servers" is technical jargon and should not appear in the UI. "Swatches" or "Paints" is better. I think a generic dialog for all paints would be better than a dialog only for patterns.
Please tell me what do you think about this idea. Is it suitable as GSOC project? Which alternative is better in your opinion?
The proposal looks sensible. If you don't have too much experience with the Inkscape codebase, I think you could limit the proposal to providing the pattern preview in the fill and stroke dialog and converting a few things to C++ along the way.
Regards, Krzysztof