In case someone missed it, we now have a very nice extension by Jos Hirth that creates a "Lorem ipsum" random text of given length. Nice! I changed its name to "Lorem ipsum", moved it to the Render submenu and changed it so that the first sentence is always "Lorem ipsum" (the rest are randomly shuffled). Enjoy. If you have an idea of another helpful extension, don't hesitate to ask on the list!
On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 16:45 -0300, bulia byak wrote:
In case someone missed it, we now have a very nice extension by Jos Hirth that creates a "Lorem ipsum" random text of given length. Nice! I changed its name to "Lorem ipsum", moved it to the Render submenu and changed it so that the first sentence is always "Lorem ipsum" (the rest are randomly shuffled). Enjoy. If you have an idea of another helpful extension, don't hesitate to ask on the list!
Yep, I committed this patch. There are several cool ones like this in our patch tracker that we need to apply.
Thanks for giving it that Bulia love. I started wondering where that love went ;)
Jos, great job! What else are you working on? It would be great to have a good brainstorm about other extensions people want. Here are five off the top of my head:
1.) flickr image search/import (and variable control over the license so you could get a legal image you can trace and use inside inkscape) I think on a basic level, this will just return the top 1-5 (user-selectable) images that are found and put them on the canvas for selection
2.) More design auto-generation like lorem ipsum but for letterhead (with fill-in the blanks), business cards, cd cases, etc
3.) hook up more importers/exporters to inkscape (very low hanging fruit)
4.) go through and convert ideas from other illustration apps. extensions
5.) connect up some low hanging fruit web sites/services like pull in dictionary definitions, wikipedia text, etc.
I challenge other people on the list to stir up 5 more extension ideas of your own and post them, then we can take them and add to the wiki (but hopefully we will inspire development of them by doing this)...
Jon
Jon Phillips wrote:
I challenge other people on the list to stir up 5 more extension ideas of your own and post them, then we can take them and add to the wiki (but hopefully we will inspire development of them by doing this)...
A little redundancy here :D
1. automatic one-button publish from Inkscape to OCAL
2. automatic one-button publish from Inkscape to flickr
3. automatic one-button publish from Inkscape to picassaweb
4. automatic one-button publish from Inkscape to deviantArt
5. automatic one-button publish from Inkscape to art.gnome.org
On Sun, 3 Sep 2006, Jon Phillips wrote:
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2006 17:33:38 -0700 From: Jon Phillips <jon@...235...> To: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> Cc: inkscape-devel <inkscape-devel@...6...> Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Lorem ipsum extension
On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 16:45 -0300, bulia byak wrote:
In case someone missed it, we now have a very nice extension by Jos Hirth that creates a "Lorem ipsum" random text of given length. Nice!
"Lorem ipsum" is a clever name but almost too clever. (Excellent idea though and it is alwasy great to see people creating more effects and extensions already.) Although "Lorem ipsum" it is an expression probably well known to typesetters it is not exactly self explanitory for the average beginner. It doesn't convey the idea of filling in a space with largely meaningless sample text. A more obvious could save user from having to try each effect to figure out what it is supposed to do, or have to trawl through the manual (no matter how well written the manual is, not needing to read it is even better).
I changed its name to "Lorem ipsum", moved it to the Render submenu
Why Render? It is creating a block of real text as opposed to rendering a path or other shape isn't it?
Maybe a submenu "Effects, Text" or something general like that? (A suitable category to add piglatin or caesar cipher effects and other fun bits and pieces.)
I'm mentioning this now given the difficulty of moving anything later. This might be a good time to plan ahead and try to setup some categories in the effects menu. A whole submenu and four menu items for a "Fretboard Designer" will quickly lead to overcrowding. I only barely know enough to be able to guess that Fretboard designer is probably related to some kind of diagram for guitar music but the labelling it is entirely non-obvious to anyone who doesn't already know what it is.
I dont have any definative suggestions on what suitable categories might be just yet but perhaps as we get a few more effects things will become clearer.[1]
Developers might also want to try and keep a clear record of maintainers for each effect because there will inevitably come a time when things need to be reorganised and updated. Many effects will be useful but some will only appeal to a niche audience and they will not all necessarily make great defaults to show off what inkscape can do or streamline common tasks.
See how the GNU Image Manipulation Program gradually accumulated a very large collection of plugins - everyone wants to be included by default - without gaining quite so many developers resulting in long term maintaince burdens. (Call me paranoid but at least by saying this I reduce the chances of it actually happening unintentionally.)
Jos, great job! What else are you working on? It would be great to have a good brainstorm about other extensions people want. Here are five off the top of my head:
One of the menu feature requests listed in the tracker was "Ungroup All" something which could presumably be quite easily written as an extension (and possibly be rewritten in C++ later if deemed important enough when people start using it).
I challenge other people on the list to stir up 5 more extension ideas of your own and post them,
Or if you cannot think of your own pick one of the many existing request: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=93438&atid=604309
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
[1] Looking to Adobe Illustrator for reference wasn't helpful at all but I looked so I may as well mention it somewhere.
Google images, screenshot of Adobe Illustrator Effect menu: http://www.applelinks.com/reviews/gifs/cs2-ill-effect.jpg
On 9/5/06, Alan Horkan wrote:
I changed its name to "Lorem ipsum", moved it to the Render submenu
Why Render? It is creating a block of real text as opposed to rendering a path or other shape isn't it?
Maybe a submenu "Effects, Text" or something general like that? (A suitable category to add piglatin or caesar cipher effects and other fun bits and pieces.)
Chiming in... A functionality I would expect from a "Lorem Ipsum" extension would be filling an existing shape with random text, thus I would try to find this function in "Text" menu in the first place.
Alexandre
On 9/4/06, Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> wrote:
"Lorem ipsum" is a clever name but almost too clever. (Excellent idea though and it is alwasy great to see people creating more effects and extensions already.) Although "Lorem ipsum" it is an expression probably well known to typesetters it is not exactly self explanitory for the average beginner.
Perhaps, but would a beginner need it at all? Usually designers use it for mock-ups to show to clients.
I changed its name to "Lorem ipsum", moved it to the Render submenu
Why Render? It is creating a block of real text as opposed to rendering a path or other shape isn't it?
Render here has a general meaning of "create", as in, create some object which didn't exist before. Perhaps the submenu should be renamed to just "Create".
Maybe a submenu "Effects, Text" or something general like that?
Yes, when we have more extensions for text, we can add a new submenu for them.
One of the menu feature requests listed in the tracker was "Ungroup All" something which could presumably be quite easily written as an extension
No, implementing this correctly requires quite a lot of transform math, and this is something only Inkscape core can do effectively.
On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, bulia byak wrote:
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 20:03:14 -0300 From: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: inkscape-devel inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Lorem ipsum extension
On 9/4/06, Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> wrote:
"Lorem ipsum" is a clever name but almost too clever. (Excellent idea though and it is alwasy great to see people creating more effects and extensions already.) Although "Lorem ipsum" it is an expression probably well known to typesetters it is not exactly self explanitory for the average beginner.
Perhaps, but would a beginner need it at all? Usually designers use it for mock-ups to show to clients.
Beginners might want to fill a space in with sample text and write the proper text later same as anyone else. There is no sense being deliberately obscure if someone can suggest a better lable. Right now I cannot suggest a better more immediately obvious lable but I know if I do not mention things now it will be much more difficult to change it later.
I changed its name to "Lorem ipsum", moved it to the Render submenu
Why Render? It is creating a block of real text as opposed to rendering a path or other shape isn't it?
Render here has a general meaning of "create", as in, create some object which didn't exist before. Perhaps the submenu should be renamed to just "Create".
Create seems too general. Render seems fairly appropriate for Grid and I'd be tempted to throw pattern generators in there too.
Maybe a submenu "Effects, Text" or something general like that?
Yes, when we have more extensions for text, we can add a new submenu for them.
I dont mind deferring this until later so long as reorganisation is part of the plan.
One of the menu feature requests listed in the tracker was "Ungroup All" something which could presumably be quite easily written as an extension
No, implementing this correctly requires quite a lot of transform math, and this is something only Inkscape core can do effectively.
Even a bad implementation could be useful but thinking about it further needing to unlink clones and other thing would probably complicate matters.
Speaking of transforms many scripts will want to use basic operations like scale and transform so basic scripts that do just one thing, even things already provided for by inkscape would provide useful building blocks for beginners. (I learned gimp scripting by writing really simple scripts that did little more than hello world and then moved up to slightly more complicated scipts, which still didn't do all that much).
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 00:18 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
There is no sense being deliberately obscure if someone can suggest a better lable.
Well, among graphic designers the process of adding mock text like "Lorem ipsum" is called "greeking". Don't know if that helps.
-mental
MenTaLguY wrote:
On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 00:18 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
There is no sense being deliberately obscure if someone can suggest a better lable.
Well, among graphic designers the process of adding mock text like "Lorem ipsum" is called "greeking". Don't know if that helps.
-mental
Isn't that a more general term, like drawing anything that looks like text? Such as how Adobe shows a gray pattern when text is too small to be displayed correctly.
bob
On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 03:15:45PM -0500, Bob Jamison wrote:
MenTaLguY wrote:
On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 00:18 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
There is no sense being deliberately obscure if someone can suggest a better lable.
Well, among graphic designers the process of adding mock text like "Lorem ipsum" is called "greeking". Don't know if that helps.
-mental
Isn't that a more general term, like drawing anything that looks like text? Such as how Adobe shows a gray pattern when text is too small to be displayed correctly.
Would anyone be confused if it were simply called "Random text" ?
Bryce
El Jueves, 7 de Septiembre de 2006 05:14, Jon A. Cruz escribió:
On Sep 6, 2006, at 1:31 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Would anyone be confused if it were simply called "Random text" ?
Some call it "Dummy text". To me that sounds a little better.
Scribus calls it "Sample text".
On Sun, 3 Sep 2006, Jon Phillips wrote:
On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 16:45 -0300, bulia byak wrote:
rest are randomly shuffled). Enjoy. If you have an idea of another helpful extension, don't hesitate to ask on the list!
Yep, I committed this patch. There are several cool ones like this in our patch tracker that we need to apply.
I challenge other people on the list to stir up 5 more extension ideas of your own and post them, then we can take them and add to the wiki (but hopefully we will inspire development of them by doing this)...
This could be one or many extensions but orbs, bubbles, buttons, spheres, and whatnot are basically just simple shapes with nice gradients and maybe the occasional filter but can produce rather effective results. (Xara does quite a bit of this sort of thing it seems.)
participants (10)
-
Alan Horkan -
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Bob Jamison -
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
Jon A. Cruz -
Jon Phillips -
MenTaLguY -
n3storm -
Nicu Buculei (OCAL)