On 4/5/07, Bill Baxter <wbaxter@...155...> wrote:
This is exactly what Pattern along Path is great at. No need for Objects to Pattern.
All of those lines were created by sweeping a _raster image_ along the path. That's what I'm after.
If you pnly have a raster, it's much easier to trace it to vector and then use Pattern along Path. Vectorizing it has other advantages too.
Now I'll admit that in those specific cases they all look like they could be done equally well by sweeping a vector object along the path. But that's not always so easy if what you want to sweep along the path is some kind of noisy natural texture, for instance. In particular I was trying to apply a scanned image of a pencil line to try to make lines that look more like they were drawn by a pencil.
Try Calligraphic pen with high Tremor.
I think what you're not getting here is that "common" is in the eye of the beholder. I can't see myself ever needing that spiral tool. I do however frequently need block arrows, but keeping them symmetric while adjusting the length, width, pitch of the arrow head, etc is a pain.
Note that I said "not trivial to do with existing tools." Creating all sorts of axially symmetric shapes is quite trivial by using clones.
If I were a designer of clockwork mechanisms I'd like to have a star-like tool for making gear wheels.
Agreed, but this would be better as a mode of the Star tool, not as a new tool.
If I were a cartoon maker I'd like to have speech bubbles where the roundedness and location and length of the pointer part were easily modifiable.
Again, trivial to do with existing tools. By the way randomized and rounded stars make pretty good bubbles.
If I were a flow-chart maker I'd like to have presets for all the common flow chart symbols
And we do have that, see Connector tool and the markers in Stroke Style tab in Fill and Stroke.
If I made greeting cards I might like to have parameterized heart-shaped objects
I rather doubt that. If you want your cards to have a human touch, more likely you would want a good freehand drawing tool for naturalistic strokes, and our Calligraphy pen provides exactly that.
If I made database process charts I might like to have a parameterized barrel-type shapes If I made qbert landscapes I might like to have a way to make a perspective cube without assembling it from three distorted squares.
These we will hopefully have at the end of this summer with the 3D Box tool, see http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~malbert/.
So ultimately all that I'm saying is that it would be nice if there were an easy way to create new parameterized objects besides the stock four (circle,square,star,spiral).
And what is not easy about looking up e.g. sp-star.cpp and star-context.cpp and modifying them for your own kind of object? There's not much there, most of the code is the pure logic of the shape itself. Admittedly, it can probably be made simpler still, but it's not like we have long queues of developers wishing to create new object types :) For example, for the 3D tool, 99% of the work will be figuring out the math and finding the best behavior of its operation; inserting it into Inkscape will be the easy part.