On 4/5/07, bulia byak <buliabyak@...155...> wrote:
On 4/3/07, Bill Baxter <wbaxter@...155...> wrote:
Love the python scripting too. Can't wait to start tinkering with it. I have done a bit of research on manipulating drawings and have plans for more things. (http://www.cavie-x.net/doodle/) It might be nice to implement future things as Inkscape Python scripts or perhaps more full-fledged plugins.
I like the idea of spray-painting with randomized steps from a path interpolation. I added this to the corresponding RFE:
It's also a very interesting technique for animation (i.e. randomization + interpolation). I'm looking forward to how inkscape develops on that front.
If you haven't seen Takeo Igarashi's work on animation, it's very slick. http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/research/rigid/index.html this one's mostly 3D but the same concepts apply to 2D http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/research/squirrel/index.html
It would be great to see inkscape move in a direction like that.
Stroke patterns seem to be limited to axis-aligned textures? Is there any way to transform the pattern applied to the stroke, at least in global coordinates?
Looks like a bug. Fill patterns show handles but stroke handles do not. Can you please submit it to the bug tracker?
Ok, I'll try to repro exactly what the case was where it wasn't working and check here first that it's really a bug.
It would also be nice to be able to apply a texture in a curvilinear coordinate system relative to the stroke itself, with x being the direction tangent to the stroke, and y perpendicular to it. Being able to do curve-relative mappings opens the door to lots of possibilities. Like Hsu's "Skeletal Strokes" (which I see someone has already noted on the wiki: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Expression)
Try the Pattern along Path effect
Hmm, that just made an axis aligned texture along the path for me. So trying to apply a little pencil texture (approx 8px x 64px) to a previously drawn curve just resulted in a curve horizontally striped with my pencil texture. Maybe I wasn't using the right modes for Pattern along Path?
Why are spirals and stars top level tools? Seems very odd to have two such niche items on the main toolbar. Are they actually used that often? Why not gears or block arrows or speech bubbles or ... etc.
Gears and bubbles are not simple geometric figures. Stars and spirals are.
After going through the tutorials I see that "Stars" is something of a misnomer given the range of things you can do with a star. You can make a triangle toothed gear pretty easily with the star tool. Square toothed would be harder, but rounded teeth are no problem (Corners:20, Spoke Ratio:0.85, Rounded:0.6).
Spirals on the other hand... well the tutorials didn't have much to say other than "these aren't as useful as stars". Anyway I think the approach taken by MSoffice (and probably others) makes sense. The idea being that some objects can benefit from having a few high-level adjustment handles. Inkskape's Cirlces,Rects,Stars and Spirals operate in this way, but there's basically an unlimited number of parameterized objects that could be useful.
It would be really cool to be able to create custom "rigged' objects similar to the built-in tools. Then things like speech bubbles and block arrows and all the other objects in MS office could be implemented as instances of that type. The idea of a handle that controls a parameter in turn controls a combination of attributes is very powerful. It's basically the thing that makes 3D animated movies like Shrek possible at all, but I think it could be just as useful in a 2D drawing package. The "parameters" can be anything. Even like a time value for an animation or a morph. Or whatever else you can imagine.
I'm curious about the choice of usage for Tab and Space keys. Space as select tool toggle is reasonable, since that is pretty frequently used. Still, seems to me like Photoshop's hold-toggle for canvas panning is a better option (i.e. needed more frequently), but easy access to the selection tool is also nice.
Panning the canvas is much easier by middle mouse button - no need to touch keyboard at all.
My laptop doesn't have a middle button.
Actully, this has already been proposed many times by former Adobe users who are used to space-for-panning. My official stand on it always was: if someone implements this as an option (off by default), we will accept the patch. You need it, you code it :)
Oooh. That's encouraging. I'd like to look into it. I got the source compiling this morning. Is the basic infrastructure for handling temporary toggles in the input system there currently? That would be step one. Or actually... now that I think about it, step one would probably be to implement a grabbing hand tool, period, since there doesn't seem to be one.
But Tab as "select next" seems like a waste of prime keyboard real estate. I don't see how this is useful once you have more than a dozen or so elements in your drawing. Some kind of hide/reveal function might be good for this.
I use Tab all the time. _Most_ real world drawings use a limited number of objects. And in complex drawings, you normally use grouping and layers, and Tab/Shift+Tab always select object within the current layer or group (if you entered the group, i.e. made it a temporary layer).
I see. The tutorial also makes a good case for Tab, based on the fact after unselecting all it gives you an easy way to select the top object or the bottom object. I also noticed tab works for editing points on a curve. That's very nice to have.
Is there a way to hide everything but the current selection? Or to use outline rendering for everything but the current selection?
Not at this time.
I kinda like the way Flash handles recursive edits for this. If you double click on an object that is actually a named group the background washes out and you can see the thing you're working on clearly.
I was playing around with editing the about.svg splash screen and with all the blurring going on rendering was very slow when zoomed in. Outline mode fixed the speed, but then it's hard to tell what the current thing I'm editing really looks like.
Watch the selected style indicator in the statusbar. It's quite informative showing you at a glance the fill, stroke, and opacity of the selected object (though currently not blur). Textual description in the statusbar is also very useful.
I see. That is somewhat better than nothing at all. But it seems like it might be common to get just "unset" as the value there if you have lots of clones. (I was just trying the technique out on the "keys.svg" file).
Regards, --bb