On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 09:39, Johan Ceuppens wrote:

I was thinking of bringing up a GUI which greps/seeks the jar file for filenames and letting the user choose which SVGs to open. If you'd like different or additional behaviour, please share with the list.

Okay, so I was thinking about this some. And, I think this is a good first pass - I was thinking how this should 'really' work.

Let me start with some of my inspirations.

- When I think of the listing that you're talking about - I think of Cinepaint, with their frame browser. So basically you can choose any frame in the list and edit that frame. This seems like something that is useful in Inkscape for working on things like presentations, but the reality is that we aren't dealing with movies.

- This led me to start thinking about different pages. Because, in a nutshell, that is what we're trying to accomplish with this. In OpenOffice.org Impress different pages are represented by tabs on the bottom of the screen. This as the disadvantage that switching between pages is difficult - but it could be helped dramatically by having the position of the tab be more intelligent. But, screen area is used for documents that don't contain multiple pages. Overall, I don't like this.

So, how do we handle different pages?

Here's an idea:

We handle them like layers. So we've talked before about the idea that there would be a 'layers' dialog that would have the layers of a document. But the discussion has always been, what is a layer? Basically it's a group, why are only the special ones in the dialog? I think this conversation has always gotten to the point where we decide that there has to be a tree of groups in the dialog. Well, why can't the list of documents be the root of this tree. So if I open up a JAR file and an SVG I get:

- myjar.jar - svg1 - svg2 - other_svg.svg

Then, if I want to add other_svg to myjar, I drag it up to that position. Also, there should be a way to create a 'New Compound Document' which would put another root element that could contain documents itself.

What I don't like about this approach is that there is two things at the root level, compound documents and unique documents. But, on the flip side, I think this is something that the user might not have a difficult time grasping because they are both 'things' on the hard drive.

Comments? Ideas? Flames?

--Ted