On Sun, 2017-11-19 at 10:17 +1000, John Billingsley wrote:
I am not crabbing! I am keen to see Inkscape get as much success as possible. But to do that, you need to look at the market, rather than clever gizmos.
I did not intend to imply you were inappropriate with your comments. I only wanted to add some project historical clarity to your thoughts. In the hope that they would be more powerful outfitted with up to date information.
My wife lost patience with Corel Draw after their successive versions became so cluttered with 'enhancements' that they were virtually unusable. Corel 8 was very comfortable, but when x7 is installed it has similar microscopic icons to those of Inkscape.
I don't believe the tiny icons are a feature added by Inkscape. Rather a way inkscape doesn't resize for high resolution displays correctly. So on some computers Inkscape will display exactly the same number of pixels for it's icons, but these icons will be large and succulent targets for a mouse pointer.
I am sure that a basic subset of the software could be put together with very little effort, offering more than Windows Ink but with 'dive straight in' appeal. Alternatively all but the essential tools could be hidden on first installation, with some tips on how to add them.
I have that target in mind. I already have a couple of example configurations that strip down the inkscape experience. But these won't be available until 0.94/1.0 since inkscape has historically been unconfigurable and much of the user interface was glued into code. We've unpicked a lot of that this release cycle though to help.
PS I suspect that for the pen to be discovered by the program, the Wacom driver interface might need to be added. If this is the case, maybe a textbox could give that advice, in the same way that Audacity shows how to add LAME for mp3 saving.
Inkscape comes with wacom support, I don't think there's something you have to add. (unless there's something in the windows build that's needed) on linux wacom tablets work out the box.
Best Regards, Martin Owens