UI ideas for next version(s) of Inkscape
The usual disclaimer... not a programmer, but perhaps some GSOC participant would find my suggestions worthy of implementation.
Inkscape has gained some pretty impressive features lately, but complexity has taken a toll on the UI. It now contains many icons, toolbars, and dialogs, and these UI elements take a lot of space, even on a large monitor. he problem is even more pronounced on an Ubuntu desktop where the GTK theme forces Inkscape to render all toolbars using extra large icons, making it too large for many resolutions. The dialogs are also too large, with oversized controls and a lot of spacing, and you can barely fit a couple of them on each side when they are docked.
Gimp had a similar problem and they solved it by introducing a "small" theme that users can st, which makes all the icons and widgets smaller. I think Inkscape could benefit from using such a theme.
Another great UI improvement would be to make inkscape remember the windows settings between sessions. Currently whenever I open a new session of Inkscape I have to resize the window and turn on a couple of dialogs - layers and fill & stroke. Then I have to resize the dialogs themselves because the layer dialog opens with hardly any space to show more than one layer. It would be great if Inkscape could remember those settings between sessions.
One last thing, a very small one - I think having layer dialog icon next to the other dialog icons on the right size of the main toolbar could be useful.
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Michael Grosberg wrote:
Inkscape has gained some pretty impressive features lately, but complexity has taken a toll on the UI. It now contains many icons, toolbars, and dialogs, and these UI elements take a lot of space, even on a large monitor. he problem is even more pronounced on an Ubuntu desktop where the GTK theme forces Inkscape to render all toolbars using extra large icons, making it too large for many resolutions. The dialogs are also too large, with oversized controls and a lot of spacing, and you can barely fit a couple of them on each side when they are docked.
Another thing is that width of some dialogs in Inkscape depends on length of tabs captions (e.g. Document Properties). In GIMP this is solved by using icons in captions (in fact they provide a switcher between icon, icon + text and just text).
Alexandre
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 4:46 AM, Michael Grosberg < preacher_public@...19...> wrote:
The usual disclaimer... not a programmer, but perhaps some GSOC participant would find my suggestions worthy of implementation.
Inkscape has gained some pretty impressive features lately, but complexity has taken a toll on the UI. It now contains many icons, toolbars, and dialogs, and these UI elements take a lot of space, even on a large monitor. he problem is even more pronounced on an Ubuntu desktop where the GTK theme forces Inkscape to render all toolbars using extra large icons, making it too large for many resolutions. The dialogs are also too large, with oversized controls and a lot of spacing, and you can barely fit a couple of them on each side when they are docked.
Gimp had a similar problem and they solved it by introducing a "small" theme that users can st, which makes all the icons and widgets smaller. I think Inkscape could benefit from using such a theme.
Another great UI improvement would be to make inkscape remember the windows settings between sessions. Currently whenever I open a new session of Inkscape I have to resize the window and turn on a couple of dialogs - layers and fill & stroke. Then I have to resize the dialogs themselves because the layer dialog opens with hardly any space to show more than one layer. It would be great if Inkscape could remember those settings between sessions.
One last thing, a very small one - I think having layer dialog icon next to the other dialog icons on the right size of the main toolbar could be useful.
Hello all,
I am a student looking at participating in GSoC this year by improving Inkscape's UI. I am formulating my proposal right now, so any input related to UI changes would be great.
As Michael said before, Inkscape's interface has grown more complex and bloated than it needs to be. My main goal for this summer is to provide a much more friendly and organized interface. This will make it much easier for people new to Inkscape and/or vector graphics to learn how to use the program. Also, this will reduce the amount of work needed to create a "Kidscape" version, mentioned by Jon Cruzhttps://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/kidscape-project .
If you have any specific UI improvements aside from those already mentioned, please let me know. Any input is appreciated. Thank you very much for your time!
- Russ Creech
Russ Creech <russcreech@...360...> writes:
Hello all,I am a student looking at participating in GSoC this year by
improving Inkscape's UI. I am formulating my proposal right now, so any input related to UI changes would be great.As Michael said before, Inkscape's interface has grown more complex and bloated than it needs to be.
Hey... I never said that... it got bigger because Inkscape has acquired a lot of new functionality... Important functionality. It may be a good idea to create a "Kidscape" version but as a professional artist, I am very much in love with Inkscape's UI which I think is somewhere between "slick" and "ingenious". It's just that it doesn't all fit very well in a single monitor due to oversized controls on the two platforms I use (Ubuntu and Windows).
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 9:12 PM, Michael Grosberg wrote:
Hey... I never said that... it got bigger because Inkscape has acquired a lot of new functionality... Important functionality.
Well, not exactly. Two examples.
1. "Fill and Stroke" and "LPE" dialogs. They are quite wide mostly because we use labels instead of icons, and labels, being more descriptive, take a lot of space, especially when translated (English is known for its words to be shorter in average that equivalents in many other languages).
2. "Undo History" dialog. It doesn't ellipsize names of actions and makes the dialog as wide as it takes to make all letters fit.
Alexandre
Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 9:12 PM, Michael Grosberg wrote:
Hey... I never said that... it got bigger because Inkscape has acquired a lot of new functionality... Important functionality.
Well, not exactly. Two examples.
- "Fill and Stroke" and "LPE" dialogs. They are quite wide mostly
because we use labels instead of icons, and labels, being more descriptive, take a lot of space, especially when translated (English is known for its words to be shorter in average that equivalents in many other languages).
Apparently the fill and stroke dialog currently use both icons and text (!). Regarding icons in tabs only. A downside of using icons instead of labels of text is that icons can be quite subjective, text labels on the other hand are really clear and straight forward (how does one illustrate "snap"?). Interface designer Aza Raskin wrote some wise words about this some time ago: http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/06/25/the_end_of_an_icon/
The idea to make it configurable what to show sounds a bit suboptimal. Perhaps there is some more clever way to solve the problem at hand. - Andreas
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:22 PM, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
- "Fill and Stroke" and "LPE" dialogs. They are quite wide mostly
because we use labels instead of icons, and labels, being more descriptive, take a lot of space, especially when translated (English is known for its words to be shorter in average that equivalents in many other languages).
Apparently the fill and stroke dialog currently use both icons and text (!). Regarding icons in tabs only. A downside of using icons instead of labels of text is that icons can be quite subjective, text labels on the other hand are really clear and straight forward (how does one illustrate "snap"?).
A read square around a node in a path :)
Interface designer Aza Raskin wrote some wise words about this some time ago: http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/06/25/the_end_of_an_icon/
The idea to make it configurable what to show sounds a bit suboptimal. Perhaps there is some more clever way to solve the problem at hand.
Well, I'm not saying we should use icons _everywhere_. The way it is done in GIMP works pretty cool. Just try using text in tab captions there and you'll see the difference immediately :)
Anyway, GIMP/SVN trunk already has smaller text for dialogs only to make widgets smaller. So we can try either way.
Alexandre
-----Original Message----- From: inkscape-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:inkscape-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Alexandre Prokoudine
- "Fill and Stroke" and "LPE" dialogs. They are quite wide
mostly because we use labels instead of icons, and labels, being more descriptive, take a lot of space, especially when translated (English is known for its words to be shorter in average that equivalents in many other languages).
I agree that the LPE dialog can be quite big due to the desciptions. Is it desirable to reduce the font size of those wordings?
Hello all,
I am a student looking at participating in GSoC this year by improving Inkscape's UI. I am formulating my proposal right now, so any input related to UI changes would be great.
If you have any specific UI improvements aside from those already mentioned, please let me know. Any input is appreciated. Thank you very much for your time!
- Russ Creech
For screens with a low Y axis res such as the EEE (480px) I noticed the left hand tool dialog does not provide a scrollbar - the bar just runs offscreen. Only a minor niggle, and in reality I probably should not be running inkscape on the EEE but I have a valid reason to do so, and it would be nice to be able to accomodate it.
Regards, Bernie
On Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:04:07 +1100, "Bernard Gray" <bernard.gray@...400...> wrote:
For screens with a low Y axis res such as the EEE (480px) I noticed the left hand tool dialog does not provide a scrollbar - the bar just runs offscreen. Only a minor niggle, and in reality I probably should not be running inkscape on the EEE but I have a valid reason to do so, and it would be nice to be able to accomodate it.
I've seen it run off the bottom of a 1024x768 screen, so it's a bit of a bigger issue than just the EEE.
-mental
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 10:04:07AM +1100, Bernard Gray wrote:
Hello all,
I am a student looking at participating in GSoC this year by improving Inkscape's UI. I am formulating my proposal right now, so any input related to UI changes would be great.
If you have any specific UI improvements aside from those already mentioned, please let me know. Any input is appreciated. Thank you very much for your time!
- Russ Creech
For screens with a low Y axis res such as the EEE (480px) I noticed the left hand tool dialog does not provide a scrollbar - the bar just runs offscreen. Only a minor niggle, and in reality I probably should not be running inkscape on the EEE but I have a valid reason to do so, and it would be nice to be able to accomodate it.
Fwiw, I've seen reports that by careful theme selection and undocking the left toolbar makes it more usable on the EEE. For the more ambitious, a modest amount of codebase hacking can trim the toolbars down enough to even fit it in 640x480 (see my blog at http://bryceharrington.org/drupal/inklite). JonCruz and others are doing some more intrinsic work in making inkscape work on small form factors - you should offer to assist in testing, or small coding projects if you're interested.
Bryce
On Mar 25, 2008, at 4:04 PM, Bernard Gray wrote:
For screens with a low Y axis res such as the EEE (480px) I noticed the left hand tool dialog does not provide a scrollbar - the bar just runs offscreen. Only a minor niggle, and in reality I probably should not be running inkscape on the EEE but I have a valid reason to do so, and it would be nice to be able to accomodate it.
Yes.
The top toolbars have mostly been converted to standard GTK+ toolbars, but the vertical one has not yet been converted. Once it is, then it will also have the overflow menu.
The main holdup is that there is a lot of functional logic tied into peeking directly at the UI widgets, so it wasn't a trivial fix.
Oh, and also the conversion I've been doing involves replacing the hardcoded toolbar code with Actions and internal XML. I'm targeting being able to expose some XML format for the toolbars, similar to how the menus are exposed. This will allow you to trim down what shows up where, drop the icons/tools you don't use, etc.
-----Original Message----- From: inkscape-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:inkscape-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Michael Grosberg Sent: dinsdag 25 maart 2008 10:47 To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] UI ideas for next version(s) of Inkscape
Another great UI improvement would be to make inkscape remember the windows settings between sessions. Currently whenever I open a new session of Inkscape I have to resize the window and turn on a couple of dialogs - layers and fill & stroke. Then I have to resize the dialogs themselves because the layer dialog opens with hardly any space to show more than one layer. It would be great if Inkscape could remember those settings between sessions.
Did you have a look at the windowws global preferences? (not microsoft windows) I think there you find the setting that you want to enable.
Regards, Johan
<J.B.C.Engelen@...360...> writes:
Did you have a look at the windowws global preferences? (not microsoft
windows) I think there you find the
setting that you want to enable.
Can you expand on that? I'm not sure what you are referring to - in Ubuntu I have a "windows" preference but there's nothing there about icon size, and anyway I was talking about something that only affects Inkscape the same way the small theme in Gip only affects Gimp. After all, one size does not always fit all. It makes sense to have large icons on some applications, but not others.
-----Original Message----- From: inkscape-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:inkscape-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Michael Grosberg Sent: dinsdag 25 maart 2008 19:17 To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] UI ideas for next version(s) of Inkscape
<J.B.C.Engelen@...360...> writes:
Did you have a look at the windowws global preferences?
(not microsoft windows) I think there you find the
setting that you want to enable.
Can you expand on that? I'm not sure what you are referring to
I was referring to Inkscape remembering window location and sizes. (which is why I only quoted that part from your mail ;)
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 5:46 AM, Michael Grosberg <preacher_public@...19...> wrote:
Gimp had a similar problem and they solved it by introducing a "small" theme that users can st, which makes all the icons and widgets smaller. I think Inkscape could benefit from using such a theme.
I would love it if GTK gave us a simple way to make everything smaller! It is really GTK's area of responsibility, not ours. We do strive to make a few things smaller, such as control bar texts and buttons, but this is an ugly hack forced by lack of cooperation from GTK. I would be happy to get rid of these hacks and have a single "use small theme" master switch. Please bug GTK developers about this! :)
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 9:21 PM, bulia byak wrote:
I would love it if GTK gave us a simple way to make everything smaller! It is really GTK's area of responsibility, not ours. We do strive to make a few things smaller, such as control bar texts and buttons, but this is an ugly hack forced by lack of cooperation from GTK. I would be happy to get rid of these hacks and have a single "use small theme" master switch. Please bug GTK developers about this! :)
I'd say, bug themes developers. I've used a number of really small GTK+ themes like Gummy Orange. They are cool, but not available by default in distros.
Alexandre
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine
I'd say, bug themes developers. I've used a number of really small GTK+ themes like Gummy Orange. They are cool, but not available by default in distros.
Is it possible to assign such a theme only to Inkscape and not other GTK apps? If not it's still something to bug GTK guys about.
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 9:36 PM, bulia byak wrote:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine
I'd say, bug themes developers. I've used a number of really small GTK+ themes like Gummy Orange. They are cool, but not available by default in distros.
Is it possible to assign such a theme only to Inkscape and not other GTK apps?
On UNIX this is usually done using a USER_GTKRC variable.
Of course, you could just steal code from GIMP that would give you a UI for that :)
Alexandre
participants (10)
-
unknown＠example.com -
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Andreas Nilsson -
Bernard Gray -
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
Jon A. Cruz -
MenTaLguY -
Michael Grosberg -
Russ Creech