On Sun, 4 Sep 2005, bulia byak wrote:
Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 20:12:21 -0300 From: bulia byak <buliabyak@...155...> Reply-To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-user] Effect Wishlist
On 9/4/05, Alan Horkan <horkana@...3...> wrote:
I think Crop could be very useful but I'm thinking perhaps we should be giving more encouragement to the author of SVG Slice which I believe is looking at the big picture
I don't see what is in common between sliced export and cropping canvas size. Both may be useful but for different things.
Why are people calling it cropping? What are they actually planning on using it for? Calling it cropping implies how they might expect it to work (like a crop tool as opposed to a button in a Page Setup dialog). Given the talk about EPS and Postscript perhaps this question relates to a suboptimal priting workflow (although it is often more confusing to think of EPS/PS/PDF in terms of printing than in tersm of File Export).
If they had called it resizing the page chances are someone would have pointed out we already have that.
Maybe I'm a little hung up on the Slicing thing but it has become apparent it is something many users would be quietly thrilled to have but are able to get by with a variety of work arounds. I am also deep unimpressed by the lack of encouragement the author of SVG Slice received and I wish I had something at the time as the criticism seemed unfairly harsh (I hope he is reading because I think he is doing very important work).
This should be just a button in Doc Prefs, "canvas to drawing".
I think adding it there might not be the clearest way to present such functionality and it seems an unlikely place for a user to look,
I think it's a perfectly logical place for it.
Logic depends on your strating point and your assumptions. I tried to point out that you are totally approaching this from the developer point of view.
On top of that I think it is already confusing to have all the Page Setup settings, Document Preferences and Metadata all grouped together quite unlike other programs users might be familiar with so to put it politely the idea of cramming even more functionality in an already busy part of the interface /bothers me/.
You need to change canvas size of the document; naturally you go to Document Prefs, and that's where you find the crop button.
I really wish you wouldn't make assertions like that. Repeating your point without adding to it is unhelpful and quite frustrating and gives me nothing to work with and instead allows you to just pick at what I have to say. If it is so natural it should be quite easy for you to explain.
If you tell a user to crop the page they might look for a Crop tool (GIMP, Photoshop etc). To me that seems by far the most natural thing to do, it even more closely matches the metaphor of taking a knife and slicing off the edges from a picture.
Alternatively they might look for something to "Image, Resize Canvas" perhaps "Object, Resize Canvas" based on their experience of other programs.
OpenOffice Draw 1.1 allows you to resize the page from "Format, Page..." entirely seperate from File, Properties (metadata). Microsoft Office users might look for "File, Page Setup..." but I think by asking the question "Crop?" and then expecting users to rethink it as "Resize Page?" you have already lost a large chunk of your audience.
At the moment I think Inkscape has a user itnerface that has been micro-optomised and which great use of the features available at the time. However it it would be a mistake to think things did not need to be changed and we could do with an objective observer who could identify what needs to be refactored. (I'll go ask the Gnome usability list today, maybe see if I can get the Open usability people intersted at some later stage.)
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/