I'm pretty sure I suggested these before, and if I'm not mistaken I was told there were some implementation problems. But I think these are really important, so here I go again, perhaps someone can come up with a technical solution.
I have some issues with the docked dialogs.
The first issue is that the dock status doesn't stick across sessions. I always have to re-open them whenever I start a new instance, open an existing file, etc. And in my work process, I always need the fill&stroke and the layers docks open, so I have to re-open the two docks and then adjust the size of the layers dialog (because by default it opens at only two layers height, even if there's a lot of free space to open it in a larger size). Is there no possibility of somehow keeping their status in the inkscape config or the specific file properties?
The second problem is the width of the docks. The fill&stroke is excessively large! I have a resolution of 1280X1024 and it still take a HUGE chunk of space. and all the widgets are so large you can barely fit two docked dialogs in the same screen. if you compare that to other applicaitons - Photoshop, BLender, Gimp - you'll see that usually widgets on graphic apps are smaller. This way an artist can keep many open dialogs and still have a large canvas to work on.
Lastly, is it possible to add a "layers" button to the main toolbar, to open the layers dialog? We have an "align" button and an "xml editor" button, I'm sure the layers dialog is important enough to also have a button.
Please forgive me if this is already being worked on for 0.47... thanks for your time and keep up the good work!
Michael
On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 2:13 AM, Michael Grosberg wrote:
The first issue is that the dock status doesn't stick across sessions.
Yup, discussed very recently. We need someone to
a) switch to upstream libgdl and have some anticipated features for free b) make a switch in Preferences to store docks info in preferences.xml
The second problem is the width of the docks. The fill&stroke is excessively large! I have a resolution of 1280X1024 and it still take a HUGE chunk of space. and all the widgets are so large you can barely fit two docked dialogs in the same screen. if you compare that to other applicaitons - Photoshop, BLender, Gimp - you'll see that usually widgets on graphic apps are smaller. This way an artist can keep many open dialogs and still have a large canvas to work on.
They rely on icons, we rely on labels. If we do this for Fill'n'Stroke, we have to do it for all the rest dialogs to keep consistency. But icons won't work for LPE dialog for instance.
Lastly, is it possible to add a "layers" button to the main toolbar
Hmmm. Layers -> Layers... Ctrl+Shift+L. You don't like it? :)
Alexandre
I know this just cures the symptoms, not the underlying problem, but could we have "Miter limit" "Start Markers" "Mid Markers" "End Markers" labels from Fill & Stroke dialog renamed into "Miter", "Start", "Mid", "End" respectively? This would reduce the dialog width a bit and save quite a lot of horizontal space for somebody who is using docking panel and not-so-wide screen; It shouldn't harm usability too much as there are still some tooltips showed after hovering over labels. It's just a matter of replacing 4 strings in src/widgets/stroke-style.cpp. @Prokoudine, maybe you could do this? Please.
2009/4/15 Jarosław Foksa wrote:
I know this just cures the symptoms, not the underlying problem, but could we have "Miter limit" "Start Markers" "Mid Markers" "End Markers" labels from Fill & Stroke dialog renamed into "Miter", "Start", "Mid", "End" respectively? This would reduce the dialog width a bit and save quite a lot of horizontal space for somebody who is using docking panel and not-so-wide screen; It shouldn't harm usability too much as there are still some tooltips showed after hovering over labels. It's just a matter of replacing 4 strings in src/widgets/stroke-style.cpp. @Prokoudine, maybe you could do this? Please.
Well, it can be done, but it won't really change a lot, since longest message (Start markers) is just three letters away from "Miter limit" which cannot be cut.
Alexandre
2009/4/15 Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...>:
Well, it can be done, but it won't really change a lot, since longest message (Start markers) is just three letters away from "Miter limit" which cannot be cut.
By "cannot be cut" you mean the shortened name will not make much sense? It makes quite a lot of difference here: http://wstaw.org/p/7474
2009/4/15 Jarosław Foksa wrote:
Well, it can be done, but it won't really change a lot, since longest message (Start markers) is just three letters away from "Miter limit" which cannot be cut.
By "cannot be cut" you mean the shortened name will not make much sense? It makes quite a lot of difference here: http://wstaw.org/p/7474
So is it miter or is it limit? :) Relying on tooltips is quite dangerous usability-wise.
Alexandre
Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...360...> writes:
2009/4/15 Jarosław Foksa wrote:
I know this just cures the symptoms, not the underlying problem, but could we have "Miter limit" "Start Markers" "Mid Markers" "End Markers" labels from Fill & Stroke dialog renamed into "Miter", "Start", "Mid", "End" respectively? This would reduce the dialog width a bit and save quite a lot of horizontal space for somebody who is using docking panel and not-so-wide screen; It shouldn't harm usability too much as there are still some tooltips showed after hovering over labels. It's just a matter of replacing 4 strings in src/widgets/stroke-style.cpp. @Prokoudine, maybe you could do this? Please.
Well, it can be done, but it won't really change a lot, since longest message (Start markers) is just three letters away from "Miter limit" which cannot be cut.
The biggest space waster seems to be the color gradients in the fill&stroke dialogs. currently on Ubuntu + human theme they are 225 pixels wide and cannot be made smaller. If they could be scaled down to 128 that would save a lot of space. But it's basically a problem of widget size - all the combo boxes, spinners, sliders and buttons have very large margins and padding. I suppose it has to do with the theme, but Gimp somehow manages to overcome this so I'm sure it's not impossible to do this for Inkscape as well.
On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Michael Grosberg wrote:
The biggest space waster seems to be the color gradients in the fill&stroke dialogs. currently on Ubuntu + human theme they are 225 pixels wide and cannot be made smaller. If they could be scaled down to 128 that would save a lot of space. But it's basically a problem of widget size - all the combo boxes, spinners, sliders and buttons have very large margins and padding. I suppose it has to do with the theme, but Gimp somehow manages to overcome this so I'm sure it's not impossible to do this for Inkscape as well.
It has to do with theme, yes. Most themes used and distributed have insane padding and too large icons. Somehow few theme authors care about that. Dust Compact themes looks good, and there are several others.
GIMP partly solves the issue by using smaller font size for docks and a customized theme that uses current system engine, but changes padding and the like withing the engine and, IIRC, partly in code. This is something we could try to do as well.
Alexandre
Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...360...> writes:
GIMP partly solves the issue by using smaller font size for docks and a customized theme that uses current system engine, but changes padding and the like withing the engine and, IIRC, partly in code. This is something we could try to do as well.
Alexandre
If you could do that it would be awesome. Please consider this.
participants (3)
-
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Jarosław Foksa -
Michael Grosberg