On 8/17/07, Aaron Spike <aaron@...749...> wrote:

It would be more convenient and require less mental effort for the user if they could see them. It helps to be able to see all of the boxes, not just the selected box, while creating new boxes.

You can. Just select all and then draw with Rect tool. It will even snap to the existing rects. (It will unselect all but the new one once you finish it, though.)

there is a simple solution. I can select all the boxes and give them color while I am working with them. But again this is only a work around.

Everything can be called workaround for something else. For example, if we implement your "magic slices" and I want to change their color, I will most likely have to go and search for that in prefs. Which, for me, is a poor workaround for just selecting the boxes I need and clicking on the color palette.

And it require effort from a user to do something that we should provide a real solution for.

No solution is "real". One may be better than another but it does not make it more "real" in any sense. A specialized solution may be more convenient, but it may also be more clumsy and getting-in-the-way of those who don't need it.

See, a new specialized feature is worth it if it offers something which is _in principle_ impossible or very hard to do with existing tools. And even if it has some added value, that feature better be very isolated and orthogonal to everything else. Otherwise, if it's instrusive, it must provide some really basic and important facility in order to be considered.

The slicing facility is important for many people, check. But doing it via "magic slices" is very intrusive and non-orthogonal because it involves a whole new kind of objects and/or controls that all tools will need to be aware of - no check. And it also does not offer much added value compared to the naive approach, except some conveniences that may be just as well incorporated into existing tools/templates/dialogs - also no check. That's why it does not pass my filter.

...

Yes, but this is just one of the dozens of selection methods available in Inkscape. Most other methods work fine.

Could you please list the "dozens" of selection methods? I know we provide quite a number, perhaps even 12 but I think you may be exaggerating.

OK, granted, "dozens" was an exaggeration :) But you can get 12 if you count all the keyboard modifiers in selector :)

Now, of all of the selection methods that Inkscape provides, what would you say is the simplest, most obvious method for selecting a single object. I argue that it is the single click of the selector tool.

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?

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.