Hi Inkscape developers

I hope to participate in GSOC 2009 and have written my project proposal in the bottom of this message. I have (very) briefly outlined the idea in an email to Jon A. Cruz, and he did not seem dismissive to this idea ;)

This has some overlap with existing blueprints in Launchpad, so this project could be complementing current ongoing efforts in the code base. It seems that the work has barely started yet, so i hope my work will speed up things in this regard. My project proposal is below, and i have signed up for GSOC 2009 (name: frederikf) but not submitted my proposal, since i wanted some feedback from you guys first.

Best regards, Frederik

------- Project proposal -------

Name: Frederik Fabritius

Project: Dynamic tints, tones and shades based on a named 'anchor' color

Project proposal: The idea is to have named colors which objects can inherit as fill or stroke color, so when changing the color value of the named 'anchor' color, all objects inheriting it will change color accordingly. As well as inheriting the exact 'anchor' color it should also be possible to specify an object color as 'linked' a tint/tone/shade of the 'anchor' color.

After having seen this in Xara and Adobe Illustrator i immediately thought that Inkscape was missing this feature. I saw on Launchpad that two blueprints had been written, but not much had been implemented: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/named-color-swatches https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/color-groups Jon A. Cruz 2008-06-03: This sounds like an overlap of the named color stuff, Open SwatchBook, and what I've been calling "live colors" but are actually dynamic tints, tones and shades based on an 'anchor' color.

I have briefly emailed with Jon A. Cruz about this proposal who has said he was just begun implementing part of the ground work for implementing named swatches. I was thinking that this GSOC project might offload/complement some of Jons work.

I think the concepts could be extended by not only linking shade/tint of a color, but also looking into linking colors across the spectrum such as complementary/triad/analogous colors as explained here: http://www.tigercolor.com/color-lab/color-theory/color-theory-intro.htm I consider this extension to the concept, to be out of scope of the GSOC delivery.

Final deliveries: A named swatches dialog A property editor dialog to edit the color in the swatch, which also allows one to specify a 'linked' tone/tint/shade to a named 'anchor' color in the swatch. These should support being stored in Jon's "Open Swatchbook", if it makes sense in the given timeframe.

I know Jon has considered implementing an additional color picker, but i plan on limiting the delivery to support the current color pickers implemented in Inkscape and working out the details with the mentor associated for the project.

Inkscape Questions

When did you first hear about Inkscape? Have you used Inkscape before? If so, for what sorts of things?

Ive used Inkscape mostly for illustrations for the past three years for student projects at my university. I have also used it for website mockups and for doing layouts for event invitations and the like.

About Yourself

I am currently writing my master's thesis at the Technical University of Denmark where i am writing audio processing on the GPU. I have a 2 week planned vacation where i was going to bring my laptop and work on the project as well. My main programming language is python, but have done various projects in C++, C# and java.