On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 02:26 -0600, Bob Jamison wrote:

Looks good. The "update" button is enormous, but that's ok. I guess the translators might need new strings.

I made a build with it here: http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32/Inkscape0611140157.7z

bob

Oh, but what happened to the other possible backends ;)

It would be cool to have some presets for that dialog for novices like lineart, cartoon, blueprint, sketch, etc.

jon

bulia byak wrote:

...

* This dialog now provides access to three more tracing parameters:

      o Suppress speckles: If set, spots or speckles larger than

the given size are suppressed in the trace.

      o Smooth corners: This parameter controls how much smoothing

is applied to corners in the traced path.

      o Optimize paths: If set, trace paths are optimized by

joining adjacent Bezier segments with the given tolerance.

* The dialog is redesigned to use three tabs: Mode, Parameters,

and Preview. The controls are reorganized to be easier to find. Most labels and tooltips are rewritten for clarity.

* The trace preview image is made twice larger.

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On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, bulia byak wrote:

Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] NEW: Trace Bitmap dialog redesign and new parameters

On 11/14/06, Jon Phillips <jon@...235...> wrote:

...

Oh, but what happened to the other possible backends ;)

Since they are "possible", nothing could happen to them :)

How confident are people that other backend will be added? Since there is an existing backend that works well enough it seems like there isn't a huge incentive to add others.

Seriously, since (1) the single "Potrace" tab looks confusing,

I chose not to mention it but a single tab looked very strange, and since there was only one implementation available it didn't make sense to expose users to the potrace brand name. The tab probably should have been labelled General (as Microsoft almost always does with the first tab, and often uses Advanced for another tab label) or maybe "Trace".

Since the dialog is being overhauled now might be good time to make it follow the HIG too. Relabelling the OK button to Trace might be a good idea. The word "SIOX" could either be treated as a brand name or plain jargon and not exposed in the interface at all, certianly the section heading should be "Foreground Extraction" and then maybe the checkbox item could explain further that it is using SIOX foreground extraction.

Based slightly on how the GNU Image Manipulation Program does things it might be better to either omit the credits for potrace entirely or make them a little more visible by putting them in a stock GtkAbout dialog with a button at the bottom of the dialog. (Having credits everywhere gets ugly, a mention in the main About dialog might be enough but if you are going to insist on having them in the relevant dialog you may as well have a bit of detail and show the information in a consistent standard way in a GtkAbout dialog.)

The misshapen Update button is not at all aesthetically pleasing. Derek mentioned the workflow and if you assume the default workflow is to only configure things occasionally and then stick with the settings you are satified with then it makes sense to have the preview on the first page and hope you can optimize the work flow to become (first main tab) Preview -> Trace, at least in the general case.

(2) we can do all kinds of tracing, including color, with potrace, I decided to hide the "multiple back-ends" aspect for now. If we indeed add another back-end one day, it will be easy to add top-level tabs to accommodate it.

I'll assume you could not possibly be suggesting tabs within tabs. We saw from the old preferences dialog how that got ugly fast.

Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

Maybe just clicking on preview area should update it?

I think there should be a button for this action, unless it's really made clear that the preview area is clickable. But the Preview itself should probably stay visible throughout the operation, so that users don't have to pogo-stick between tabs while they tweak the mode or the parameters. I wouldn't mind seeing the dialog be wider, for instance, to accommodate both the tab group (Mode, Params) and the preview pane w/ button at the same time.

Why not, but Illustrator had a tol like this which a a bit hard to use. So they turn to inkscape manner in their last release : ie, a dialog. But you're right that the preview of this dialog applies directly on the drawing.

I think this is not the most important : many software use preview (think of Gimp), it is just that commercial product go the way they leave preview to a direct apply.

The question is why preview : is the calcultation or display speed very different ?

Which leads me to a question, if we should rather have a Trace tool with live preview...

pygmee

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