On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 16:45 -0300, bulia byak wrote: 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 San Francisco, CA USA PH 510.499.0894 jon@...235... http://www.rejon.org MSN, AIM, Yahoo Chat: kidproto Jabber Chat: rejon@...896... IRC: rejon@...897... Inkscape (http://inkscape.org) Open Clip Art Library (www.openclipart.org) Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) San Francisco Art Institute (www.sfai.edu)

On Sun, 3 Sep 2006, Jon Phillips 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. 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). 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.) 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). 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 9/4/06, Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> wrote: Perhaps, but would a beginner need it at all? Usually designers use it for mock-ups to show to clients. 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". Yes, when we have more extensions for text, we can add a new submenu for them. No, implementing this correctly requires quite a lot of transform math, and this is something only Inkscape core can do effectively. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 00:18 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote: Well, among graphic designers the process of adding mock text like "Lorem ipsum" is called "greeking". Don't know if that helps. -mental

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 03:15:45PM -0500, Bob Jamison wrote: 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: Scribus calls it "Sample text". -- Néstor Díaz ----------- Diseño y Diversion www.barriolinux.net