On Fri, 22 Jun 2007, bulia byak wrote:
On 6/22/07, Terry Brown <terry_n_brown@...12...> wrote:
Hmmm, maybe your thinking of something more dynamic than I had in mind, I was thinking you would use a menu item to thicken/thin the selected paths based on the underlying image.
That's possible, but I don't like this approach - it's too mechanical, leaving too few room for creativity. Instead, I envision it as a different mode of the thinning/thickening brush where, instead of indiscriminately thinning/thickening selected paths, it does thinning if the background is light and thickening if it's dark, with settable thresholds/force/inversion if needed. This way you can "develop" the background image interactively, emphasizing some of the details and leaving others hidden. What do you think?
I see what you're suggesting, a thickener/thinner tool that takes a parameter from the background. That would be nice to have, but for the first cut of a complex scene it would require going over the whole thing in a manner that seems a bit like busy work to me. I think you could thicken/thin all the selected paths using a background and some threshold/gamma/radius type parameters. Then fine tune it either with the existing thickener/thinner tool or a background sensitive thickener/thinner tool like the one you're suggesting.
Do you use a graphics tablet? I'm thinking of getting one, but right now I only use a mouse, and I find the whole calligraphy / engraving area kind of futzy with a mouse, I suspect it's quicker / easier with a pen. Also I wonder if there'd be performance issues with the approach you're suggesting, in terms of how fast the tool is moved over the area of interest and how well the machine can keep up with altering the paths - that wouldn't be an issue with the less interactive approach.
But I agree thicken/thin doesn't belong as a subpart of the caligraphy tool. What about the 'draw using another path as a guide' mode, does that need more general exposure too?
No, that one is definitely part of the calligraphic tool - it draws
Thinking more about it I agree, other places where I was thinking you might use it there are more efficient ways.
Cheers -Terry
calligraphic strokes with all the same parameters and modes as usual, except they are guided. The thinning/thickening is quite different from that - it does not draw anything at all. Its only connection with the calligraphic UI is that it uses 10x of the calligraphic pen width as the thinning brush width, but it's a poor UI anyway because it's not very obvious. Having its own toolbar will allow it to have its own width control.
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org