I've added these to the roadmap On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, bulia byak wrote:

On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 15:24, bulia byak wrote: Hmm, I'm not entirely sure either of these is really necessary. Certainly "Group to Layer" would be handled by the hypothetical "from selection" option in the "New Layer" dialog. Not sure about how much or if at all "Layer to Group" would be needed. Can you provide a use case? -mental

Sorry for the late reply, I wanted to play around with version 0.40 for a while before posting and then I forgot about having drafted this message. On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, bulia byak wrote: First off you really dont want to have negative labels, they should be positive and the checkbox would indicate the state. keybinding should definately be Ctrl+Shift+N For the moment it does make sense to have these directly in the Layer menu but as other features are added and depending on how full the menu gets it may make sense to have them in a submenu Layers Arrange Move Above Move Below etc If you are going to put this in the menus at all I would prefer to see (View in this case is analagous to Show) Layers, View, Current Only All None Invert and a simliar structure for Layers, Lock, Option Option Option While this makes a lot of sense from the way layers are already implemented as Groups I'm not sure this is the best way to go as it is very specific and not coming at it from the user point of view. It might be better to have something more generic like "Convert to Layer" that would take the current selection and irrespective of it being a group or not and put it on a New Layer. (This would actually be the same as what I previously described as "New Layer from Cut"). I could apply the same logic as above to this idea but I think it this case it might be more useful to retain the grouping. In a hurry and dont have time to consider this in any further detail, hope these ideas help. Sincerely Alan Horkan Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Abiword is Awesome http://abisource.com

On Sat, 5 Mar 2005, bulia byak wrote: The Gnome HIG discourages using negatives like "Unhide" and as far as I can remember it would recommend using "Show All in Layer" instead. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your description but do you expect that this going to work like the GIMP/Photoshop where they have Merge Down merges the current layer into the layer below it. Merge Visible merges all the visible layers together Flatten Image merges all layers down leaving only the bottom Background layer (Photoshop uses the shortcuts Ctrl+E and Ctrl+Shift+E for Merge and Merge Visible respectively). If I have misinterpreted could you clarify what you meant by "merge all siblings with the current layer". Thanks - Alan

On Sun, 6 Mar 2005, bulia byak wrote: Well the difference is that if you want to keep working on a layer you can hide it temporarily and flatten the rest and keep working with a more managable two or three layers. You want to Include "Merge Visible" but not both with "Flatten Image"? I suppose that works, hadn't thought of it that way. Hopefully it wont confuse artists with bad habits too much. I definately agree that Show All Layers is worthwhile functionality, irrespective of any layer merging functionality. Siblings seems extremely confusing to me, I hardly ever use the word siblings (brothers, sisters, family but almost never siblings) and I'm a native English speaker and as I user I wouldn't be sure what exactly it might mean (i did already have to ask) so it is bordering on complex jargon. I'm still trying to understand what exactly you mean. Are you thinking of having an option called 'Merge sibling layers' that would merge the current layer with the layer below it and also the layer above it? This seems like overkill, it is confusing because I think it would be a rare enough use case. If the user wanted to merge three layers they could start on the top and merge down twice (it would of course need a good keybinding, preferably the same as either the GIMP or Photoshop but I think this is a common workflow at least from all the graphics tutorials I've gone through in magazines). Merging down repeatedly is really very effective, almost elegantly simple in its effectiveness. I would urge you to implement the necessary infrastructure, but include menu items for the more straight forward "Merge Down" and whichever of "Flatten Image/Merge Visible" you prefer or both (and as usual I'm a firm believer in keeping consistant with other applications and I think this is a good case for it). With that familiar functionality and the show/hide options you intend to implement users should be able to efficiently do all they need to do. I would hope that user-developers in need of more complex functionality would be able to implement it using extensions. I'd be intersted in hearing more of what layer functionality you think would be useful as I might try implementing something similar as a Script-Fu script for the GIMP. This all seems very complicated to use and catering to very specialised cases. Are we confident that most users will even use layers? I would have thought the average user with small projects would stick to groups and moving things around on one layer (it was years before I started using Layers in Dia and then only to break up more complicated diagrams). Sincerely Alan Horkan Free SVG Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Dia is for Diagrams http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Alan's Journal http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Abiword is Awesome http://www.abisource.com

On Sun, 6 Mar 2005, bulia byak wrote: I understand now. You are thinking in terms of Trees. I am only thinking of Layers in terms of stack (a very shallow tree). The way I understand what you are talking about is something quite different from the traditional concepts of Layers. Tonight I will look at how Adobe Photoshop handles what it calls Layer groups, which is essentially several layers under the same parent. Perhaps that will provide simpler terminology and something that graphics users might already be familiar with. I'd imagine that as you merge down the tree could be flattened in the process when only one layer was remaining at that level of the tree it would merged down onto the next branch of the tree. I dont know if Adobe Illustrator has this kind of hierachical layers yet. In a vector graphics the objects are all seperate and can easily be moved around, grouped, move up and down the z-order whereas in a raster graphics program you almost need to create a new layer for each and every object if you want that same kind of flexibility. Thanks for your patience. I think I understand much better now. Sincerely Alan Horkan Free SVG Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Abiword is Awesome http://www.abisource.com

On Sat, 5 Mar 2005 13:35:46 -0800, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> wrote: Thanks for the update. I really hope there will be some progress, because otherwise, we now have enough stuff to start thinking about a 0.42. I wonder why is that? Maybe you can write up some simple well-defined subtasks for people to try? This seems to have worked with SPRepr cleanups.

On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 18:18:58 -0800, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> wrote: Sure, I'm not saying we should postpone it again. I'm just saying that if/when we get gtkmm done, we also have enough other stuff to justify the release. I think just write them up on Wiki and send a call for help to the list. And keep reminding about it until something starts rolling.