- Inkscape Users - Inkscape Mailman

Re: [Inkscape-user] Engraver's Toolbox in Linux (bulia byak)
by Tony Vigil 11 Apr '07

11 Apr '07

So... it doesn't work quite like a charm, but it's pretty darned close. When I try to use the sculpting tool in Linux, the entire Inkscape window is grabbed and moved. It looks like that's a feature of Linux - alt/click to drag a window. It is a neat feature that I didn't know about, but it does interfere with Inkscape's sculpt key mapping. - Tony

5 4

NEW: Engraver's Toolbox
by bulia byak 11 Apr '07

11 Apr '07

Several new features were added to the Calligraphic pen to make Inkscape capable of the ancient art of '''line engraving'''. Traditional engraving is a very labour-intensive process, and while for a long time it was the only practical way of reproducing lifelike images in black-and-white print, about a century ago it was almost completely displaced by automatic halftone screens. However, line engravings have their characteristic charm, and there's no reason not to try to resurrect this art form with the help of Inkscape. A brief visual guide to the new functionality can be seen on these screenshots: http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.46-engraving1.png http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.46-engraving2.png 1. Tracking a guide path with Ctrl One of the most common operations in line engraving is '''hatching''' (or sometimes ''cross-hatching'' when several hatching grids cross): filling a space with many parallel straight or variously curved lines (usually of varying width to represent a gradual shading). You could try to achieve a similar effect with e.g. path interpolation (blending), but it is rather cumbersome and limited; manual drawing of hatch lines, on the other hand, is tedious and nearly impossible to do uniformly. Now Inkscape provides "assisted hatching" by '''tracking a guide path''', allowing you to hatch quickly and uniformly and at the same time giving you sufficient manual control over the process. Here's how to do this. First, select the '''guide path''' that you will track. It may be another calligraphic stroke, any path or shape, or even a letter of a text object. Then switch to Calligraphic pen, select the desired parameters (line width, angle, fixation etc.) and, before starting to draw, press Ctrl. You will see a gray '''track circle''' centered at your mouse pointer and touching the closest point on the selected guide path. (If you have no guide path selected, a statusbar message will tell you to select it). Now move your mouse close to the guide path, so that the track circle radius is equal to the desired spacing of your hatch pattern, and start drawing along the guide path. At that moment, the radius of the circle gets locked; now the circle slides along the guide path - and the actual stroke is drawn by the center of the tracking circle, '''not'' by your mouse point. As a result, you are getting a smooth stroke going parallel to the guide path and always at the same distance from it. When the stroke is ready, release your mouse button (or lift your tablet pen) but '''do not let go of the Ctrl key''' because as long as you have it pressed, the tool remembers the hatch spacing you set when you started drawing. Now, you have just created a new stroke and, as usual with Inkscape tools, it gets selected instead of what was selected before. In our case, this means that the newly drawn stroke itself becomes the new guide path. Next, you can draw a second stroke along the first one, then a third one along the second, etc. Eventually you can fill any desired space with uniform hatching. The attachment to the guide path is not absolute. If you stray your mouse pointer far enough from the guide path, you will be able to tear it off (the track circle turns from green to red) and move freely. This is intentional; this feature allows you, for example, to continue drawing a stroke past the end of a guide stroke, thus making your hatching cover a wider area than the initial guide path. Special care is taken to make such tearing off as smooth as possible and to suppress violent jerks, but this is not always possible; the general advice is to not try to hatch too fast. If jerking and unintended tearoffs still bother you, try increasing the Mass parameter. Also, special code is in place to prevent flipovers - accidental jumps to the other side of the guide path. Brief flipovers are suppressed, but if you intentionally go over to the other side and stay there, eventually Inkscape will obey and your tracked stroke will also flip over to follow you. Tracking a guide also allows some slight feedback by gradually changing the tracking distance in response to your drawing behavior. Thus, if you're consistently trying to draw closer or farther from the guide than the current tracking distance, the distance will correspondingly decrease or increase, so you will get a hatching that is slightly spacing in or out. (The effect is very slight, however, so as not to become a nuisance.) Also, note that since tracking follows the edge of the stroke, strokes of varying width (such as those tracing background, see below) will result in gradual change of the hatching shape as you proceed. 2. Tracing background by stroke width There is a new toggle button on the Calligraphy tool's controls bar, '''Trace background'''. When on, the width of your pen depends on the lightness of the background under the stroke in each point, so that white translates into the minimum stoke width (1) and black translates to the maximum (which set by the Width parameter). This can work alone or in combination with pressure sensitivity, depending on whether the Pressure button is also toggled. This feature allows you to not only hatch over an imported bitmap image or any drawing, but to do so automatically reproducing the highlights and shades of the background with your strokes becoming lighter and heavier as needed. 3. Thinning/thickening of paths with Alt Even with background tracing, the visible lightness/darkness of a hatching may not correspond too well to your artistic intention. Also, with guide tracking, the ends of strokes are often far from ideal - they may be too blunt or have unsightly bends or blobs. This is where the new thinning/thickening function is indispensable. While in the Calligraphy tool, press Alt. You will see a orange-colored circle indicating the area that will be affected; this area is 10 times the size of the pen when you draw (so you can change it by changing the Width parameter on the toolbar). Now select some or all of the paths (as with most tools in Inkscape, only selected objects are changed), for example by pressing Ctrl+A, and start '''Alt+dragging''' over the paths. Where you touch them, paths become thinner, as if melting away, up until total disappearance. Conversely, '''Shift+Alt+dragging''' makes selected paths thicker in places where you touch them. As with the Calligraphy pen itself, the '''size''' of the thinning/thickening area by default depends on zoom; simply zooming in or out is often easier than adjusting the width if you want to cover a smaller or larger area. The '''force''' of the effect also depends on zoom (or in other words, it stays the same when measured by screen pixels, same as when you move and object by Alt+arrow keys). Also, if you have a pressure-sensitive tablet, the force of thinning/thickening also depends on '''pen pressure'''; tapping slightly produces gradual lightening or darkening of your drawing, while pressing heavily will work as a kind of quick "erasing" (with Alt) or "blackening" (with Alt+Shift). Of course, thinning/thickening is very useful '''not only for calligraphic strokes'''. You can select any simple path (such as an ellipse converted to path) and start '''sculpting''' it, spawning smooth treacle-like appendages with Alt+Shift and melting them away with Alt. Unlike the "node sculpting" mode in the Node tool, however, this does not require adding new nodes to the shape or selecting any nodes. This new functionality is somewhat similar to the "Pucker" and "Bloat" tools in the latest versions of Adobe Illustrator, except that in Inkscape it works softer and is easier to control. '''Known problems with thinning/thickening:''' (1) it is rather slow; (2) it quickly eats memory; and (3) it is sometimes buggy - thin calligraphic strokes may suddenly disappear or change their shape drastically as you're Alt+stroking them. For (3), it helps to undo the bad change and try again with less pressure on the pen - if you do your thinning in several light touches instead of one heavy press, usually you will be able to get the desired result without the buggy behavior. In general, however, all these problems stem from the livarot library that we use for geometric manipulation of paths. Fortunately, livarot is scheduled for replacement by lib2geom, a new library now in development, so hopefully these issues will be addressed then. 4. Misc features * For consistency with other drawing tools, drawing with '''Shift''' in Calligraphy tool automatically '''unions''' the newly created stroke with whatever paths were selected (and selects the result). Thus, you can do a series of overlapping Shift+strokes to create one unioned path object instead of separate objects as before. * To facilitate changing the Width parameter, the Home/End keys in Calligraphy tool switch you to the minimum (1) and maximum (100) width, correspondingly. (This is in addition to the Left/Right arrow keys that change Width by 1; remember also that you can press Alt+X, type any width, and press Enter.) -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

6 7

Re: [Inkscape-user] Engraver's Toolbox (bulia byak)
by Tony Vigil 11 Apr '07

11 Apr '07

I forgot to mention that I am using the April 11 build for Windows. The Linux build works like a charm. - Tony

1 0

Re: [Inkscape-user] Engraver's Toolbox (bulia byak)
by Tony Vigil 11 Apr '07

11 Apr '07

Pretty neat! However, I noticed that "Import" seems to be broken. I can't even drag/drop an image into last night's build of Inkscape. Any ideas? - Tony

1 0

Re: [Inkscape-user] [Inkscape-devel] NEW: Engraver's Toolbox
by bulia byak 11 Apr '07

11 Apr '07

On 4/11/07, John Bintz <jcoswell@...2057...> wrote: > I was just thinking, like, a few days ago, about adding/requesting > something that would assist with my comic inking, namely something to help > keep my stylus locked on my scanned pencils. :D Unfortunately, tracking a guide only works for a guide _path_, it cannot track a line in an imported bitmap. But try tracing it first with Edge Detection turned on - I recently removed extra blurring from edge detection, so now it gives a more detailed result than before. > The parallel lines > feature looks lovely, too. I'm going to see how this works tonight with > my comics. By the way, now that I opened a new page of 0.46 screenshots on the site, it would be nice to have a screenshot from you demonstrating the use of paintbucket tool with some of your cool comics :) -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

1 0

Export and Blurs
by Brett Nash 11 Apr '07

11 Apr '07

Hello, I'm currently trying to automate the extraction of a few images. The command line I'm using is something like: inkscape -j --export-id=<id> --export-png output.png However, the exported image is cropped a bit on the side - and it is because is blurred. Basically inkscape is not taking into account the additional size of the of the object due to the blur. Is there an easy way around this? I've reported it as bug 1698120. My inkscape version is: Inkscape 0.45+devel, built Mar 30 2007 Regards, nash

2 1

exporting to PNG is fine, exporting to EPS is ugly
by Ryan Underwood 10 Apr '07

10 Apr '07

Is anyone able to get nice results exporting to PS or EPS from inkscape? I am using inkscape as a preview and converter in LyX, but I get the same results using the command line or exportin from the GUI. This seems to be a new problem now that I am using inkscape on Linux, when I was using inkscape on Win32, the EPS output looked nice as far as I can recall. I am using the text-to-path and bounding box options. The output seems to be monochrome instead of grayscale, so there are jaggies everywhere, and the diagram exceeds the size of the page. I just compiled the snapshot with the same results. PNG previews look great. That is what puzzles me. Is this a problem with rendering the alpha channel into the EPS which doesn't support alpha? -- Ryan Underwood, <nemesis@...2133...>

4 6

Inkscape Project Status
by Bryce Harrington 10 Apr '07

10 Apr '07

Just to give some visibility into some of the work bubbling away these days: Cairo renderer: Bulia has taken point on investigation of conversion to Cairo. Some tough problems have been uncovered but we're gaining a clearer picture of what needs done. Presently this looks like it will require an all at once brute force approach, rather than incremental refactoring. If so, we'll need to reach a decision on how to undertake that while minimizing disruption to SVN HEAD users. Build system: There is definitely a concensus that our current build system sucks. Options include CMAKE, Bob's buildtool, or just a cleaned up automake. We really need to have interested parties mind meld and find a single solution. Version control system: Mental has been experimenting with git and trying to get it to operate with svn. This study is still very early on, but if it works out well, one day we may begin encouraging developers to use git. Bug tracking: I have been experimenting with use of Mantis with the goal of replacing our SF bug tracker. It looks good, but the principle issue is how to migrate the bugs and their history from SF to Mantis. I'm also interested in seeing if it can be combined well with Drupal, maybe along with Pootle. Any drupalheads out there? Manual: We've got a good unofficial non-free manual/book and several [semi-]official incomplete free manuals. There is discussion about if efforts can be combined to produce a good official free manual. Anyway, I've probably missed something, but I think that covers the pending changes that are percolating. Most of these would benefit from discussion, so we can make sure there is a rough concensus favoring the change - so if you have concerns about any of these changes, now's a good chance to bring 'em up. Bryce

7 15

Re: [Inkscape-user] Bitmap Export
by Docsonic 10 Apr '07

10 Apr '07

Mental - I hang my head in shame. Of course I do not use IE (I use Opera which views SVG wonderfully) so that wasn't an issue, but I do use Irfanview and that was causing the incorrect transparency view. I tried the image in Gimp and it looks fine, so does a jpeg export of the png. Testing on only one viewer is a lame thing to do and I am humbled :-) Thanks, Tony

1 0

Is there a printed Inkscape book or manual?
by John R. Culleton 10 Apr '07

10 Apr '07

The Inkscape book offered by Lulu is just a download in A4 format (I use letter format.) I am looking for a printed and bound book for my shelf, like "Grokking the Gimp" etc. Is there a paper version anywhere? I recognize it will be expensive because of the many color pages. -- John Culleton Able Indexing and Typesetting Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost. Satisfaction guaranteed. http://wexfordpress.com

2 1