On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Daniel Klein wrote:
Yesterday I tried, to amuse myself, making a mockup panelling for a comic that I'm working on with a visual artist (you guessed it - I mostly do the words :P).. it's incredible how painful proper layout with CSS can be. As these things go, 'to amuse myself' turned into a holy crusade and I would not rest until I could churn out professional layout mockups by the dozen. So I got Inkscape.
Have you been able to make good use of the grids and guidelines? Check out Shift-3 (aka #) to turn the grid (and snapping) on and off quickly. Very handy.
The next 2 hours were spent rotating and resizing stars and occasionally saying 'wow'. I shake my angry fist at you all.
*grin*
Now I don't ONLY write here to stroke all of your egos. I have a little problem. Actually I feel ashamed to ask, because I'm sure newbies have stumbled over this a hundred times, but I could find nothing in either the archives nor the Wiki, so I'll ask here and add it to the archives:
When exporting my wonderful drawing, I get a certain problem: First couple of attempts, all was black in the png. Now, after making a somewhat more complex .svg, PART of it shows up in the export. Please refer to http://ubermutant.de/~bringa/page1.svg (16k). In this mockup, only the mocked magazine cover on the right hand side shows up in an export. (I needn't mention that you shouldn't look at the content.. this is a mock-up only :P). If anyone could clear this up for me, that'd be great. One could also have some sort of Usage-related FAQ in the Wiki, and this would be a good first item to start with, I think.
Okay, I've downloaded your svg and played with exporting it. I'm not completely certain of the problem but can offer some observations/ideas.
First, note that on the export dialog you have options for what to export. If you click on 'Page' or 'Drawing', you should get all the items exported correctly. I tested this out and it seemed to work fine. If you for instance picked 'Selection', then it only exports the items you have selected. By default I think it does 'Selection', which may explain the issue you ran into, but I'm not certain.
Second, note that it's going to export 'transparent' for anything that isn't there. Which normally is what you want... but perhaps not in your case. You can control this via Document Properties -> Page -> Background.
Third, note that when you resize things, sometimes the line width will change, so it's a good idea to doublecheck that they're all set consistently to 1.00 or whatever via the stroke style dialog. Kind of a quirk, but there's been some talk of changing that in the future.
Anyway, hope that helps. :-)
Btw, for inspiration definitely check out Mental's Lunar 8 Comics: http://lunar8.rydia.net/ -- done with Inkscape and Batik.
Bryce