Hi all,

In writing up an article about Inkscape (for LWN hopefully), I took some time to play with a wider variety of features than I normally do, and thought about how new users (like LWN's Grumpy Editor) would approach the tool in general. So I figured I'd share my random thoughts and comments.

First let me preface by saying that like everyone else I love the new features and the direction Inkscape's going. It's improved bunches in the months that this project has been active, and it's amazing to realize how much energy has been invested into it.

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1. I don't use the software intently enough to have memorized a significant number of the keyboard shortcuts, so I'm still very much a menu-oriented person, so my first comments regard menu items:

* The "Text and Font..." dialog was really difficult for me to find; I assumed it'd be under the Object menu and had to look through all the other menus before I found it under Edit. It was also strange that it was at the bottom of the Edit menu instead of at the top, like the property dialogs in the Object menu.

* Now, of anyone, I probably know best where the marker settings are, however it really seemed hard to get to. I kept thinking, "Hmm, where's the line properties again? Oh yeah, the Fill dialog box..." I'm not sure how this could be improved but it struck me as counter intuitive.

* The right-click context menu needs a *lot* of attention. With the dialog menu being moved to other menus (which is a great improvement), I found that I kept wishing to have various things available from the context menu.

* I pulled up the keyboard shortcuts page, and it's great that it's so complete, and of course it's beautiful in SVG. However, I found it very difficult to find stuff in it. There's just sooo much text... I wanted to search the document but of course we don't have a ctrl-f Find or ctrl-s Search command

* The Object Properties dialog is very odd to me. It *seems* like for a basic user this would have some very handy and useful things on it for customizing the way my object looks, but when I look at it, it's full of rather esoteric features. What does "printable" mean, for instance? Does this mean it will show up on the screen but not the printer? Also, on the context menu it's called "Item Properties" but pulls up the Object Properties dialog. Weird! I would expect the Object Properties dialog to allow me some sort of way to get to things like text, color, line style, transform, etc.

* Shouldn't New Window really be called Duplicate Window or Clone Window or something? I assumed this command would do the same as New.

2. I notice the performance isn't quite as "snappy" as I seem to remember. Perhaps a consequence of fixing bugs? It's not horrible, but noticeable.

3. For the life of me, I've never been able to figure out how to get the inset, outset, and offset commands to work. I'm sure if I studied the tutorial I'd figure it out, or if I've used something like them before in other apps. It "feels" like I should be able to apply it to a path but that doesn't seem to work right.

4. The star tool is set to remember its settings, which seems like a great idea, but it's really weird to start up a fresh Inkscape and click on it and instead of getting a five pointed star, to get whatever shape it was you made the last time you used it. This seems highly inconsistent with the way the rect and circle tools work - they always give you what you see on the icon bar.

5. I think we need to rethinkify the calligraphic tool. I played with it for half an hour to see if I could get something worth putting in the article but didn't like anything I made. Does anyone use this? What is it useful for?

6. The undo system can be kind of quirky. For example, click on the line drawing tool. Draw one line. Start drawing another one but before you end it, hit Ctrl-Z. Instead of the current line going away, the first one you drew disappears. And no amount of undoing/redoing seems to be able to bring it back.

7. I played around with gradients bunches and bunches. I know folks think this could use a lot of improvement, but I found it pretty easy to figure out how to make it work and get good results out of it. Of course, I've been using it for years so probably have too much insider knowledge, but it seemed to do what I needed.

8. Ditto for node editing.

10. Now for comments about markers. :-) I love all the work that's gone into markers. It's awesome to finally see them in play, especially since I know first hand how non-trivial it is to get them to do what we need. I love that finally I can put arrows on lines! But, that said I have lots of comments:

* First, as mentioned above, it's really hard to get to the marker settings. I keep expecting to right click on my line and hit, "Marker Properties" or "Arrowheads" or something.

* Strangely, when I was doing the article, all the marker previews were of the club symbol. But now for some reason they all work right. Has anyone else noticed this behavior?

* If you select to turn off Stroke Paint, the marker dropdowns on the Stroke style page become inactive, yet the line still shows its arrowheads. Of course, the arrowheads are always black regardless of stroke color, so this is super counter-intuitive. I'd suggest this: Move the marker dropdowns to their own tab, separate from Stroke style, and make them not become invalid when the stroke paint is turned off. It'd be wonderful if you could choose the marker colors for each marker type on that tab page.

* For the 'None' setting in the marker dropdown, perhaps show a stub line with no marker on it.

* The ordering of the markers in the dropdown seems strange. Partially they're alphabetized, but it feels like they really ought to be organized by category.

* The symbols for DistanceRight and DistanceLeft don't really illustrate the effect. Also, perhaps these could be called DimensionLeft and DimensionRight?

* The arrow style markers work wrong. The tip of the arrow should be located at the end node of the line. Instead, the end node is at the middle of the arrowhead. This means that if you draw a line to a box, and then put an arrowhead on it, the arrowhead will be partially *inside* the box.

* I half expected to be able to hit the "Convert Object to Path" button and be able to have the marker converted into node path for manual editing. No idea if that'd actually be of real value, though.

* Since there's a None setting for markers, it feels like there should similarly be a None setting for Stroke pattern, that'd make the line go away. I wanted to create an object that consisted only of mid-markers with no actual line. I achieved it by turning the stroke color to none on the other tab, but that didn't seem like the most intuitively obvious way to do it.

* Instead of making the dropdowns fit the page width, could they be sized to match the contents? Also, I notice some of the larger marker previews are cropped - could the dropdown be sized based on the size of the largest marker?

Anyway, that's that. I know a lot of these things are already in our tracker and todo list, or have very good reasons for being the way they are, but those are my thoughts on it.

Oh, and btw, if you'd like a preview of the article, her ya go:

http://www.bryceharrington.com/Booleans_article/inkscape_booleans.html

I've sent an inquiry to LWN to see if they'd be interested in running it, and plan to have it polished up and published somewhere within a week or so.

Bryce