G'day guys,
Someone new has started here in Brisbane who comes from a heavy illustrator background. During her first day using Inkscape she's written up this short document mentioning her initial reactions.
a good quote to summarize: "I can find this stuff out by reading the manual. I'm just telling you what isn't immediately apparent enough as I feel like it ought to be."
------------------ Becc's Inkscape Hassles --------
Magnification in/out buttons: Wanting to zoom out, I hit the button showing the magnifying glass with a minus sign on it, then clicked on the page several times waiting for it to zoom out the same way it does when you've clicked on the button showing the magnifying glass with + sign on it. It didn't, but instead zoomed in. These buttons shouldn't imply they offer in/out aspects of the same tool but not behave consistently with this implication.
Zoom level indication: The level of magnification indicator down beneath my work is out of whack with the zoom tools being up in the menu above it: I don't expect to hit a button on one menu and have to look to a field on another one to see the changes it's effected. At the time that I performed the above zooming in and out, I had nothing on my page and was zoomed in to a level where I couldn't see the edges of the page. As such, I was wanting feedback letting me know that my actions were having some kind of effect. (I expected this to be zooming me out, which turned out not to be the case – I was still zooming in, as mentioned – but any feedback would've been helpful in letting me know this button wasn't working as expected and that I should thus adjust my approach.)
Ditto with the related shortcuts: I can hit Shift++ but not Shift+-, which is inconsistent.
I can use a scrollbar to move my view horizontally but not vertically. Makes moving my focus difficult. (NB: I later worked out I can scroll up and down using the mouse wheel; okay, but having a scrollbar for only one kind of pan when both kinds of pans are possible is inconsistent and leads one to believe, as I did earlier, that only one kind of panning is possible – otherwise, surely both would be represented onscreen in the same way, y'know? Also, what do you do if you don't have a wheel mouse?)
I'm not sure what to hold down to create a perfect circle. I seem to have managed it accidentally by holding down Shift one time, holding down Ctrl another time, and holding both together another time, but none of these seem to create a perfect circle consistently: in each case switching to an oval occurs if I'm not very careful about where I'm dragging my pointer while I have the appropriate key/s held down.
If I want to select nodes, I seem to not only have to use the "node edit" tool but must first select the entirety of the object(s) the nodes are a part of in order to be able to do so. This slows me down by adding in a step that doesn't seem necessary or logical. It also took me some time to work out that the problem wasn't simply that the node selection tool doesn't work – I really only kept trying because I knew from having created that teardrop shape when you were standing there assisting me that nodes could be selected and edited somehow – which is going to present to potential converts from, er, say, Illustrator, as bugginess and incompleteness.
Please let me rotate my object as easily as I can resize it, without opening the Transform menu. Sometimes I don't know how many degrees I want to rotate it, and sometimes I just want to turn it 'round 'til it looks about right, so need to be able to wiggle it around experimentally. :)
So, I'm beginning to form an idea of this program (and point this out in the assumption that any user will do similarly) as having not just paths with nodes like Illustrator does, but also having something called "objects" that fit into all of this somewhere. My immediate difficulty with that is this: I'm working at present with a shape that's made up of a path. However I wouldn't know it to look at it when selected, because the fact that it has a path outlining it isn't readily apparent unless I not only select it but double-click on it. I don't recall having to ever double click on something to edit it. Is showing its path possible with just one click (also, can I see the wire line of the path rather than just the nodes on it when I do so? I can't make out the shape of what I'm working on when it's over/under an object of the same colour!)? Could doing this perhaps serve also to allow the user to easily see what's a shape and what's a path? As it is, I'm still having difficulties conceptualising what the building blocks of this program are (which is important because they're what I'm going to use to develop my drawings etc as a user), and I wonder if making the differences between the two more readily discernable might assist in getting that across...
Is the node edit tool the only way I can alter a line once I've drawn it? I'm accustomed to being able to select it and alter it with the pencil – particularly when I'm using a graphics tablet, this is my preferred method of working, cuz it makes using a computer to draw just like using a pencil and paper. :(
I've hit a numeral a few times when meaning to type something or enter a size or angle of a rotation into a text field and instead found my view suddenly changed. This isn't a bug – I've obviously had the focus in a place other than where I thought it was – but a suggestion that the numbers on the keyboard not be used to change the view without the use of the Ctrl or Shift key consistent with usual shortcut behaviour.
Fill and Stroke colours are taking up so much real estate in their respective menus that they shouldn't need. I know you're trying to supply optimum control, but I'm being overwhelmed by details here when all I want is to select an appropriate shade of pink to colour the pieces of my exploded brains. Clicking on a colour swatch on the main screen shouldn't open up a menu offering me options to choose between fill, stroke, and stroke style, and then (once I've worked out that I should stay inside the 'fill' tab of that menu) decide between what kind of fill, whether I want to use RGB or CMYK or Pantone, the colour(s) amongst those I want to use, etc, all at once. I just want to change the colour. Wouldn't it make more sense when I click on a swatch of colour to open up a menu offering me only colour options? Sure, the colour is an attribute of a background; so offer the other background options in the menu's other (unfocused) tabs – not options having to do with strokes or stroke style.
As with the Fill option, the Stroke options are taking up a lot of space because they're providing a lot of detail I don't immediately need if I'm just clicking on, say, a swatch (in which case I want to change the colour), or on a
I can't seem to shift objects up and down within a layer. Does this mean that if I don't want to employ layers for something that before I start drawing I need to think about the order in which I need to draw objects, starting from the bottom up? :-/
Er... I can't scroll left to right using that scroll bar I mentioned earlier! I can't remember if it was working then; it certainly isn't now.
Joining two path ends together would be handy – something I use all the time
When I try to copy a style using the eyedrop tool, as an Illustrator user I'm expecting both fill and stroke to be applied to the object I'm working with. At the moment I'm getting only fill. Since I do have the whole object selected and not just its fill, I'm not finding any logical reason why both fill and stroke settings shouldn't be getting copied over.
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