the star, and maybe a polygon tool of some sort for n-th sided polygons.
I've been meaning to suggest that it would be useful to have a Polygon as well as a "Star" Tool (pentagram, poly* => Polygram?). It brings the feature closer to the user, easier to discover and use even and worth the slight repitition.
You can create a polygon with the star tool now, if you use node edit to move the two control points together. However it's a good idea to provide a shortcut for that action, I will add it to TODO.
If the current spiral tool does not do enough to be interesting to you and you want ways to make it more poweful/usefull I am linking to an example file (svg and png) and a screenshot of the Spiral Tool from Jasc Web Draw which has lots of options (curved or flat sides, number of turns, number of rotations, linear or logarithmic expansion etc).
All of these options, with the exception of flat-sided spirals, are possible with Inkscape. It's even more flexible: instead of choosing between linear and logarithmic only, it allows you to set the expansion value precisely (both above and below 1, with 1 being linear), and you can vary the number of rotations interactively on the canvas (switch to node edit). Overall, it's a very good tool. Although the flat-sided spirals would be nice to have too.
Although I keep mentioning Jasc Web Draw I have to say that it is a flawed program missing all kinds of details but I do think it contains a few fresh ideas and I will try and take more screenshots. I probably shouldn't speculate like this but I'd really like to see a stable Inkscape 1.0.0 [1] declared this side of six months and give them a run for their money! here are those links.
I found this on your site:
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/jasc-webdraw-tooltips.txt
I must say that arrow keys moving is already much more powerful in Inkscape (both by pixels and by fixed increments), while using arrow keys for rotating objects is a very stupid idea, imho. Arrow keys just don't stand for rotation. I'm now implementing a comprehensive set of shortcuts for rotation using [ and ] keys with various modifiers.
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I found this on your site:
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/jasc-webdraw-tooltips.txt
I had somewhat forgotten about that...
I must say that arrow keys moving is already much more powerful in Inkscape (both by pixels and by fixed increments), while using arrow keys for rotating objects is a very stupid idea, imho. Arrow keys just don't stand for rotation. I'm now implementing a comprehensive set of shortcuts for rotation using [ and ] keys with various modifiers.
[clearly i need to build and use InkScape a whole lot more and not be so badly uninformed about how things like the spiral tool work, but the machine i use for most of the day and write my email on has a fairly minimal selection of software]
I'd need to think about it some more but I don't think using the arrow keys + modifier for rotation is such a terrible idea but I'll wait and see (I may well be wrong). I think there is plenty of room to use those modifiers to overload the arrow keys to allow rotation. In case you had not already realised (and if you search the web it will become clear) that I very much appreciate having good default keybingdings for everything that can reasonably have a keybinding.
However if you want to do things with [ and ] you will definately need to at least check the AZERTY keyboard layout and perhaps others to make sure that it is not too awkward to use those keys. I'm sure we can figure out the best answer for the majority of users.
Even if you do decide to use different keys it would certainly be nice to be able to move things by 1 pixels and N pixels increments (the N pixels is configurable not just fixed to 10 which i realised after writing the aformentioned notes).
Thanks for the reply, I am very glad that you are also interested in providing users with keyboard accelerators for most functionality and I think it is a very good idea to have default keybinding for almost everything.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Alan Horkan wrote:
I must say that arrow keys moving is already much more powerful in Inkscape (both by pixels and by fixed increments), while using arrow keys for rotating objects is a very stupid idea, imho. Arrow keys just don't stand for rotation. I'm now implementing a comprehensive set of shortcuts for rotation using [ and ] keys with various modifiers.
[clearly i need to build and use InkScape a whole lot more and not be so badly uninformed about how things like the spiral tool work, but the machine i use for most of the day and write my email on has a fairly minimal selection of software]
Actually, it indicates a problem. I was also not aware of the geometric spiral option until peter pointed it out to me :) To me it suggests that this functionality needs to be made more visible.
Incidently, the spirals in your example were quite poor with respect to the approximation - inkscape's spirals are much better.
njh
On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 19:29, Nathan Hurst wrote:
Actually, it indicates a problem. I was also not aware of the geometric spiral option until peter pointed it out to me :) To me it suggests that this functionality needs to be made more visible.
After the embarassing spiral removal thing, I had a good look into the spiral code and found that it does, in fact, really do everything I could pretty much ask from a spiral tool.
It was just very, very well-hidden...
-mental
participants (4)
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Alan Horkan -
bulia byak -
MenTaLguY -
Nathan Hurst