On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 1:39 PM, Afief Halumi <afief.h@...400...> wrote:
The Live Path Effect would need two objects, the cloud and the sun(let's forget for a minute that each of those is itself an object with an LPE applied,) but how can this be done in a stack environment? The obvious way would be to apply the LPE to one object and add a reference(pointer/id...) to the other object as a parameter. This way would most certainly work, but the second object would remain somewhere outside the object with the LPES applied to it, which will make working with a lot of LPES awkward.
I really don't see much awkwardness in this. In Inkscape, you have objects referring to other objects all the time, clones being the most common example. What exactly is the problem?
This is a (very) simple mockup for the interface as I imagine it(lots of elements taken from 3d studio max) http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/5057/mockuprv7.png
In fact, this is already possible too: A path with LPE can contain within itself (though actually, within its LPE, but it does not matter in this context) another path that it uses. For example, Bend Path or Pattern along Path carry their own bending and pattern paths with them, and they are editable in Node tool after you click a toolbar button. This makes sense for cases where this secondary path is solely for the purpose of changing the main path and, by itself, has no place in the drawing and need not normally be visible at all. However, in cases like the non-destructive boolops as with that cloud+sun, the cloud does need to be itself on the canvas, and its precise location (and not only shape) matters. The same is true for a blend LPE bteween two or more paths. So, it really depends on the nature of the LPE, but in some cases linking to another object is the best approach.
As for your proposal, it's unclear what would correspond to that parent Boolean object - is it a group? or soemthing in defs? is it selectable as an object or not?