Bill Baxter wrote:
On 4/4/07, Jasper van de Gronde <th.v.d.gronde@...226...> wrote:
Bill Baxter wrote:
...
Have you tried setting the filter quality lower? (It's in the Inkscape preferences.) That should help, it doesn't turn blur off, but it does make it considerably less expensive.
No I haven't, but Florian replied earlier in the thread that it didn't make much difference even on the lowest quality setting. Anyway it's really something that should be handled on a situation by situation basis whereas app preferences are for modifying global behavior. If you have to change an app preference based on the document you're looking at then I think it indicates a UI problem.
That's a bit strong, on my system I have to have quite a lot of blur to have it become irritating (at least for my goals), so it's not that related to the document. It's more related to the machine than the document, or at the very least equally related. So what Inkscape could do is automatically adjust this global setting based on the measured performance of your system, but that could be quite complicated.
In addition, it's a very subjective area of course. For my purposes it's not a problem if redrawing the entire screen takes about a second, but if you move around a lot, zooming in, zooming out, panning, etc. then a second might seem like an eternity. So this is also a reason for having a setting that controls the trade-off between quality and speed.
Also, there are still some ways left to speed up blurring further (e.g. by doing the subsampling at an earlier stage, and I have an interesting idea about blurring polygons in a "smarter" way), but it will always remain a relatively expensive operation.
To reduce the problem further it could be interesting to experiment with alternate views like Outline mode, as I think was mentioned earlier, so if you have any suggestions, lets hear them.
BTW, if you feel the difference between Lowest and Best is not big enough, it's something that can be adjusted relatively easily (the image is just subsampled), so be sure to post an RFE or bug report. (The only problem is that it eventually becomes quite visible, although that problem could also be reduced a bit, but then it would become a bit slower again, it remains a trade-off.)