bulia byak wrote:
Yes, but you forget another proposed method that you can use if you don't like transparent rects: make them blue, but place them in a semitransparent layer. Then when you need to export it, just set its transparency to 0. Minimum clicks to get what you need, and you can still click to select the slices. What's wrong with this?
It becomes a problem in tweaking. Export, evaluate result, change opacity, tweak, change opacity, export...
Difficult to set up? Just provide a template with that semitransparent "slices" layer already present. Difficult to discover? Write and popularize a tutorial. Cannot batch export the slices? Yes you can, in SVN this is added right to the Export dialog (the "export selected objects separately" checkbox). I can even easily add another checkbox there: export all within the object's bbox but not the object itself - and then you will not need to make the boxes transparent, because they will be hidden in the export anyway. Or, we can eventually support per-layer Outline view (this was already requested by other people for other purposes), which, if enabled for the export layer, will solve all of your problems at once: rects will be always visible and clickable even if transparent. And we can even enable per-layer outline color to differentiate them visually. Need more intuitive manipulation of the slices? Excellent suggestion, just implement the rect-specific commands for "subdivide horizontally", "subdivide vertically", and "rectangle union" on the Rect toolbar, and fix the KnotHolder so it can edit more than one selected rect (e.g. by dragging the touching sides of two adjacent rects) - and editing the slices will be a breeze, not to mention all the other benefits you get from these improvements.
See? Every convenience you can think of is easily possible with the simple approach, just by extending the capabilities of existing tools. And the big advantage is that these extensions may be useful in various other situations too. Whereas, if you create a specialized tool just for slicing, it will be useless for anything but slicing.
Thank you for not saying that what we have is good enough. Thank you for providing ideas that address the problems.
Aaron Spike