On 2007-December-13 , at 16:21 , Maximilian Albert wrote:

Maximilian Albert schrieb:

...

I just discovered that the stuff I committed for the 3D box tool also contained a patch for the ellipse tool that had accidentally slipped in.

Whoops, and another one ... (the last one, I promise). However, this one was just for my own purposes and is probably not desired in "official" Inkscape. But since it's in SVN now, I thought I'd ask if anything similar is useful to anybody before removing it.

When using the pencil tool I sometimes find myself just clicking on the canvas to mark a spot with a single dot (like a single node, but a bit more visible). Since curves containing just a single nodes are not possible, I thought it might be convenient to create a small circle instead. The mentioned patch makes this possible; simply Ctrl+clicking on the canvas while in the pencil tool creates a circle with the last-used style and a fixed (hard-coded) radius.

If no one has strong reasons to keep this, I'll remove it again because it gives the tool a kind of a "childish" feeling. But I still think that something similar can be handy. Any suggestions how to "do it right"? Or maybe this would "feel better" when moved over to the ellipse tool?

Keep those "mistakes" coming please ;) I would love to be able to create small vector dots in Inkscape. The way you did it is fine IMHO. I would recommend: - keep it in the pencil tool - if those dots are to behave as the rest of the objects of the pencil tool, the elipse should have special properties: fill and stroke should be swapped for every operation and stroke should be unset. otherwise it would feel awkward compared to the other pencil tool strokes. probably the trickiest part. - make the radius behave as the calligraphy tool: either fixed in absolute units or fixed in pixel units, so that it is still possible to make dots of different sizes.

To produce this image: http://jo.irisson.free.fr/work/illustration/carcinus_maenas_dessin.png I had to create the dots in a raster program (presumably with a special brush in photoshop). I would have loved to do them all in vector on separate layers and to have control over the scale and position of every dot (and I am particularly enthusiastic about the feature because I have several drawings of this kind to make still ;) )

JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/

On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 10:02:13AM -0600, Aaron Spike wrote:

The connect the dots python extension uses M1,2L1,2 with round line caps to create a dot at (1,2).

I like this trick a little better. How do these (round caps, ellipse) scale at different scales? It isn't uncommon for me to be making drawings that are anywhere between 500um to several meters big

On Dec 13, 2007 11:21 AM, Maximilian Albert <Anhalter42@...173...> wrote:

When using the pencil tool I sometimes find myself just clicking on the canvas to mark a spot with a single dot (like a single node, but a bit more visible). Since curves containing just a single nodes are not possible, I thought it might be convenient to create a small circle instead. The mentioned patch makes this possible; simply Ctrl+clicking on the canvas while in the pencil tool creates a circle with the last-used style and a fixed (hard-coded) radius.

I think it's a good idea, but why in the pencil tool? OK, I understand that it's good to not interrupt the workflow when drawing, but then I would think pen tool is more appropriate. But anyway, since ctrl+click is not used anywhere but in selector and node tool, I would propose the following:

- enable both pen and pencil to create fixed-size shape on ctrl+click; preferences page should let you select which shape (ellipse, square, star - why not even spiral? or arbitrary shape which is on the clipboard?) and the size either fixed or proportional to the stroke width, by default e.g. ellipse twice as big as stroke width. The style of the "point" will be the stroke style of the tool but applied to fill, not stroke.

- add the same functionality to all 4 shape tools, each creating its own shape of course, and add preference setting on their common preference page (tools > shapes) for setting the size (which can then be different from that of pen/pencil). The style in these tools will be the same as that of the regular shapes they create.

If no one has strong reasons to keep this, I'll remove it again because it gives the tool a kind of a "childish" feeling.

Childishness is good, actually, when it's done properly - not by restricting or adding noise, but by expanding possibilities and making things simpler.

On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 07:04:48PM +0100, Maximilian Albert wrote:

Thanks for your opinion, Bulia (and everyone else). Amazing - I would never have believed that this little playing of mine attracts so much attention. ;)

Anyway, your suggestions sound good and I'll see if I can implement them step by step. This will be a bit low-priority, though (it's not that I don't have anything else to do ... :)). But I'll keep them in mind.

Hi Max,

Would you mind prioritizing this work such that release-critical parts get done first, and try to determine which tasks can be left for 0.47?

Thanks, Bryce

On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 09:38:13PM +0100, Maximilian Albert wrote:

BTW, do you have a rough timeframe in mind how long Chill is going to last? How about Frost? Just so that I know how much time I have left for which kind of work (is there any restriction on the kind of work during Frost?).

I'd like to see us move from Chill to Frost in about a week, by say December 20th. During Frost, work should be restricted to bug fixing, with only a few exceptions. I anticipate Frost lasting until mid-January.

Here's how things look for our Chill objectives:

1. Wrapping up development: Good

As expected, there's a few people with last minute features wishing to sneak in under the wire. This is normal, but I'm hoping we can get it settling down soon, since feature work going on late in the development process can risk bugs or incomplete feature work. Probably the only way to force it to really quiet down will be to press ahead to the next phase.

A larger issue is that I don't know entirely what all development work is still under way. It would be really useful at this point to have a list of development projects still under way, so little projects don't pop up at the last minute and force us into making hard choices.

2. Make distcheck issues: Excellent

Sounds like Ted and Aaron have done great work at squashing these. Having this work done in Chill eliminates a big chore that usually plagues us throughout the release process.

3. Triage bug reports: Excellent

I knew switching bug trackers would help make triaging easier, but the work being done is far exceeding what I expected. A phenomenal number of bugs have gotten triaging attention. This work will set us up quite well for doing a bug hunt.

It's also satisfying to see the open bugs curve. While it's not as steep as the triaged bugs curve (20% new bugs handled / week), a solid 5% of our bugs have been closed this past week. It's hard to say what proportion of those were a result of triaging (invalid, out of date, etc.) vs. being actual fixes, but regardless a 5% reduction in open bugs is a huge step in the right direction for us.

Ryan and I created a news item with graphs on inkscape.org.

4. About screen contest: Needs Work

I'm not sure what the status is on this. I think this is the area holding us back the most, and I'm getting worried about it.

5. First draft of Release Notes: Unknown

The release notes look like they're fairly well filled out, but there's still some gaps here and there. Can someone make a list of what we need filled in, and post here for people to look at and comment on?

We have plenty of time to finish filling in the bits later, so as long as we have a todo list, that should be good enough for the Chill.

6. Update tutorials and other docs: Unknown

I don't know where we stand here. Again, it would be nice to have a todo list, especially since this is such a rich area for non-coders to contribute to the release.

Could someone take a look over the state of our existing tutorials and help documentation, and identify:

a) Partly-finished stuff that needs finishing or backing out b) Stuff needing copy-editing c) Critical documentation needs

There's no need (or time) to boil the ocean on this - just the most important work that will add that spit and polish to make users happy.

I've seen a lot of good write-ups posted to this list, or to blogs. A documenter could probably make swift progress by just gathering these bits and snippets together and massaging them into the docs in the appropriate spots.

Note, this would also be a great time for developers to take a break from their development work, to write down some comments on how to use what they developed. These write ups are a huge help for doc writers to draw from.

Bryce

On Dec 13, 2007 6:21 PM, Maximilian Albert wrote:

When using the pencil tool I sometimes find myself just clicking on the canvas to mark a spot with a single dot (like a single node, but a bit more visible). Since curves containing just a single nodes are not possible, I thought it might be convenient to create a small circle instead. The mentioned patch makes this possible; simply Ctrl+clicking on the canvas while in the pencil tool creates a circle with the last-used style and a fixed (hard-coded) radius.

Please add appropriate context help message for status bar ;-) Otherwise one simply won't know this feature exists.

And a couple more notes on the feature:

1. 'Create single point' message in Undo History is grouped under 'Draw path'. I think it deserves its own group ;-)

2. There's no way to define radius/diameter of the point.

3. Points should probably be measured in screen pixels and be relative. Or meaybe not. This is a highly controversial stuff :-)

Alexandre

On Jan 19, 2008 7:32 PM, Maximilian Albert <Anhalter42@...173...> wrote:

Done. The feature is now also present in pen tool since it's probably equally useful there. Also, the dots created by Ctrl+click are now filled with the current stroke color and have no stroke so that they look like real points. :)

That's cool, but still I would more expect this to be present in shape tool, each creating points of its own shape.

Also: after creation, the points are not selected. This is very inconsistent and makes it impossible to quickly move or paint the point. Please fix that.

Now there is. :) To be set in the preferences of pen/pencil tools.

Thanks! Can you please do two small changes:

- move it down to the bottom of the prefs page, as it's not the primary function of the tool

- rename it to "Ctrl+click dot size" so it's more clear at once without reading the tooltip

Oh, and one other feature: When pressing Shift while creating dots by Ctrl+click, the dot radius varies slightly so that when a couple of dots are created the result looks less monotone. Hope this is useful for someone.

Well, I love randomness in general, but I think it should be on Alt, not Shift. And for Shift I suggest just creating a twice bigger dot - that's more useful IMHO and more consistent with the meaning of the key.