2009/5/8 Jon A. Cruz <jon@...18...>:

Nice lightning talk by Michael Terry in regards to kinematic templates.

Definitely check out the video and/or PDF

"Kinematic Templates: End-User Tools for Content-Relative Cursor Manipulations." http://hci.uwaterloo.ca/

Whoa, that's a cool concept!! I had a few free minutes today and just committed a proof-of-concept toy to lib2geom which shows that it's probably quite easy to add such a functionality to the Pencil tool. It can be added to Inkscape when 0.47 is out.

Cheers, Max

P.S.: 2geom provides an ideal framework for playing around with these kinds of things. Maybe/hopefully this encourages a few more people to check it out and perhaps even contribute to it. Believe me, it's addictive. :-)

P.P.S.: Question to the 2geom and Inkscape gurus: Ideally, for perfect usability of the toy I need to interactively alter the position of the mouse pointer from within my toy while the user is drawing. Is this possible? Would it be possible from within Inkscape?

On May 12, 2009, at 12:12 PM, Jon A. Cruz wrote:

Thinking about it, I realize that Bulia has all the needed GUI functionality working now with the "engraving tools". He's locking in the cursor, adjusting it, etc. So in essence we have the automatic guides part and all the low-level, and only need to look into the high-level of the templates themselves.

I was thinking the same thing when I saw this. The video referred to corduroy (a fabric texture), which is very descriptive of the behavior. Rather than the dry-sounding "kinematic templates" name, it's simply a set of engraving textures, or even "grooves." Slap some grooves into the working area (that don't show up in renders), and they will help your engraving tool or other tool strokes be shaped accordingly.

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