Hello all, been playing with both sodipodi and inkscape for a few weeks and have finally got round to looking at the source code. Have a couple of suggestions for features / usability issues. First, if I've got a new session of inkscape, and i do file>open, why does it open it into a new window rather than the blank one I've got in front of me? every time it does it it strikes me as odd. Second up, have you considered making use of the boolean ops to add paintbrush/eraser tools ala flash? the functionality is all there just spread across several tools currently. The way I've been simulating it currently is to use the calligraphy tool to 'paint' an area, then whenever you paint additional areas immediately switch to select and ctrl++ it to the last section. To use it as an eraser just paint over the bits you want to delete and do a subtract. What would be good would be if there was a tool that would automatically do the boolean to the current selection. (and possibly a simplify as well.) It could do with having constant stroke width rather than the calligriphic stuff tho, preferably of selectable width from the secondary toolbar, but still with the realtime preview of whats being drawn. I'd love to be able to try this myself, but am struggling even getting the codebase to compile atm, didnt help that the tar was lacking the mingw makefiles. Am a delphi person normally and havent touched C/C++ since uni, so am more than a little rusty. :) Another feature that I'd love to see would be variable offsets, ie a dynamic offset with node weighting allowing the offset to be modified at each node so I could generate a line of varying thickness (like the calligraphy tool) but still editable by the basic centreline path. This would be a godsend for doing comic style drawings where the line weight is important. I know that ones a big task, just putting the idea out there. With regards to the 0.37 release, the builds i downloaded from Bobs site (which is really useful, both for builds and build instructions, cheers Bob) seemed to have problems with the keyboard shortcuts being messed up, the dialog ones were all muddled, (for instance Ctrl+Shift+M was opening fill/stroke) just checked the latest one there and its still the case.(zip file Inkscape0402120319.zip) What happened in the Fill/stroke dialog? the entry boxs for RGB values on the wheel tab are gone as is the dropper icon, both of which were really useful. (its a pain having to switch tool to do a dropper action, and a lot of apps give their colors in RGB, so being able to enter the values from somewhere else was good.) It is a better size now, but that tab still has a fair bit of grey space in it which could be used. Also on the this build the icons are red crosses on the tabs and join&cap selectors in that dialog. Really good work on the tutorial btw, is really helpful, and looks great. On the website the mailing lists page doesnt link to the user list archive, which would be good.

sorry to hit you with so much stuff at once, just been looking at it in increasing detail the last few days.

keep up the good work

John Cliff

btw, anyone got any suggestions as to the best place to get started with getting familiar with the code?

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