Hey Jasper,
Yes, top posting is evil. :) It seems there are a number of new things, such as diffusion curves, gradient meshes, new curve types, hatching, and more which are being looked into for SVG 2.0. Previously, we've already run into an issue with someone creating a patch to do spiral (conical?) gradients in Inkscape that basically got the thumbs down for not being SVG compliant.
I think that we need to have a configure flag for diffusion curves and other proposed SVG 2.0 features (I seem to recall seeing someone bringing up the spiral gradients too as a thought, so maybe that patch could get integrated after the proposed config modification).
With a configure flag for these "proposed" SVG 2.0 features we can achieve the following. A) We can then figure out the best UI for an authoring tool of these features and not worry about that changing in the meantime. B) We won't run into the flowtext issue again since these features must manually be flagged at build time to be used at all. C) We don't risk breaking SVG compliance in Inkscape proper (aka normal builds) and can also show that these tools/features have use cases and have merit to be in SVG 2.0. D) We can help to figure out what the syntax should look like w/o being overly concerned with this changing over time (these features wouldn't really be for production, so backwards compatibility is far less of an issue). Thoughts?
Cheers, Josh
On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 12:05 +0200, Jasper van de Gronde wrote:
I'm working on Diffusion Curves (for master thesis) and will try to get them in Inkscape in the foreseeable future (this calender year hopefully). As I'm slowly getting more grip on the technical side of things (which is what my thesis will be about) I'd love some input (and help) on UI issues.
For those who haven't heard about them yet, they're basically a new and very(!) flexible way of specifying color transitions. You just assign colors to curves and let the program fill in the intermediate space using diffusion. This tends to create visually pleasing, smooth, transitions while allowing for a very complex geometry with minimal effort. More information (especially see the references at the bottom for examples): http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Diffusion_Curves
My current thinking is that it would probably be best to treat diffusion curves as a paint server, allowing people to assign color to nodes (that either coincide with existing nodes or are positioned somewhere on the path). The colors would be linearly interpolated along the path. A scheme like this would fit in well with the idea of expanding the functionality of the gradient tool and having a general color picker.
Unfortunately this would sort of limit the ability to blur boundaries to the point that it might not make any sense. But then again, maybe it's a mistake to try and integrate two separate concepts (blur and color transitions), even in the original paper these are treated quite separately (the blur values are diffused separately and then a spatially varying blur is applied).
Any thoughts or suggestions would be helpful.
Also, would it make sense to apply diffusion curves to strokes? If so, how would that work?
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