On Saturday 19 February 2005 21:20, bulia byak wrote:
On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 20:00:49 +0000 (GMT), Alan Horkan
<horkana@...44...> wrote:
That is very cool. There is a bit of lag between the spot/handle and when the axis/spokes move which makes it feel a bit sluggish
Yeah, I know. I hope to fix this today, I think I now know how.
The old gradient position widget in Fill&stroke remains for now (and still works), but I plan to remove it as soon as the new on-canvas editing is sufficiently tested. I would welcome any feedback on the new feature.
I expect you can safely remove most of it but it might be useful to have a more controlled way to adjust gradients in addition to the interactive editing...
Hmm. What is "more controlled" about it? It's significanly less precise and much harder to control, in all aspects. (I will only remove the position control, of course, not the gradient list.)
By the way, not only is the old gradient position widget outrageously inconvenient, it was also significuntly less straightforward to program and therefore more prone to nasty surprises. I consider it a prime example of how NOT to borrow ideas from commercial software, because apparently the only reason for its existence was the fact that CorelDraw edits gradients the same way. Such an awful amount of programmer's effort and users' frustration went into it, it's mindboggling... even though better interfaces (Xara) already existed when Sodipodi started.
My version of on-screen editing is vaguely similar to Xara, but already improves on it in some ways (e.g. Xara cannot merge gradient handles).
Can I ask a Q here at this point? Sorry, I need to get into building Inkscape CVS so I havent seen it yet.
IE, how have you handled large gradient "lengths" where the item its applied to is much smaller than the gradient vector? This is one thing we have had trouble with importing SVGs into Scribus where the vector is much larger than the item. Currently a limitation of Scribus gradients is that the end points of the vector must be within the boundaries of the object, which was never the case before in Inkscape IIRC. We can edit the gradient vector on the canvas in 1.3 though. Hopefully to achieve this you wont have to zoom right out. Of course, theres argument for just changing the end points colours but that will become inaccurate if applying the same gradient to multiple objects.
Craig