On Fri, 2 Sep 2005, Ted Gould wrote:
Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 13:30:22 -0700 From: Ted Gould <ted@...10...> Reply-To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-user] Effect Wishlist
In talking with Aaron a while back he mentioned that sometimes it is hard to come up with ideas for good effects.
Dont be silly :P
Look at other software, look at the myriad of suggestions in the bug tracker Look at what people are doing and find ways to streamline a process or artistic style (okay I see you mention this second point yourself).
and I'm willing to bet that the user community has some good ideas. This isn't a call for "features" (i.e. layer dialog) more like quick little things that you can already do in Inkscape, but it takes a few steps. You do it often enough that it would be really cool to have a "one click" way to do it.
True however encouragin lots of people to send in wishlists might be counter productive. The wiki is ideal for this kind of researching and listing of requirements and then refinement into something which could then be proposed as clear request for enhancment a new developer could tackle without needing to do a whole lot of research.
Typically something that takes 5-10 steps is good (too few it isn't worth doing, too many, it may be too complex). Try to include a description of the idea, how you could do it in Inkscape today, and what kind of application you have in mind for it. Including how to do it in Inkscape today helps new users learn techniques, even if they never get made into effects -- so make sure to be clear for them! I've included a few that have been bouncing around in my head below.
If anyone wants to implement any of these, ask for help on -devel. We'd be happy to help and get you started on your way.
--Ted
-- Zealous crop --
Many times when I'm drawing something for a website I draw it, and then I want the document size to be the same as what I drew. This can be
What would Adobe Macromedia do? (Especially Freehand, see how you can effectively cut/crop/slice things using the rectangular selection.)
I hate to ignore precedent when looking at "new" features and it always helps to try and meet user expectations. Inkscape is not being developed in a vacuum.
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 and will allow important tasks to be done efficiently and make a whole lot of other things possible at the same time.
(My trial versions of Illustrator and Freehand have long since expired so I'd appreciate if others could provide feedback, best I can manage at the moment is reading their documentation or looking at Flash which behaves somewhat similarly).
On Fri, 2 Sep 2005, bulia byak wrote:
This should be just a button in Doc Prefs, "canvas to drawing".
s/should/could/
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, but as usual I would feel a lot better knowing what others have done and what users might be expecting.
Makes a lot more sense there than in an extension, and easy to add. Volunteers?
However Bulias suggestion makes it clear where in the code this might be implemented by extending existing functionality and that it is something that might be better implemented natively in Inkscape.
-- Desaturate --
If I recall correctly I think Illustrator includes quite a lot of this kind of colour control, sounds like fun.
-- Align by font size --
Adobe Illustrator came out of the Font design business but really this kind of layout seems like it would be more appropriate for Scribus but I suppose if someone was interested it wouldn't hurt. (A common plugin standard for creative apps might be nice so that these kinds of things didn't need to be reimplemented from scratch each time.)
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/