On 10/24/07, Joshua A. Andler <joshua@...233...> wrote:
I have to go with microUgly here, a modifier for opacity would be really helpful to quickly adjust colors & gradient stops. I know that your opinion tends to be that color alpha/opacity and master opacity are redundant, but, to me it's one of the things I really like about SVG.
Oh my. I wonder why I'm so misunderstood. Let me repeat.
I'm not against opacity in any shape or form. I'm especially not against master opacity, and never was. Master opacity is fine with me. I promote it everywhere. In fact, I made in available in the first place. In Sofipodi, it was not available in the UI at all. I added it to the fill&stroke and the statusbar. And I made it applicable to gradient stops as well as objects.
The only thing I want to downplay in the UI is the fill-opacity and stroke-opacity, which you call "alpha". NOT master opacity. I do it for the following reasons:
- it is redundant, because cases where you want a fill to be transparent but stroke to be opaque or vice versa are quite rare, and in all other cases you can use master opacity;
- stroke opacity works a bit counterintuitively - it makes fill show through the stroke, and fill only fills up to the centerline, which makes a confusing and rarely useful sight. Master opacity applies equally to all, preserving the way the object looks and just fading it out in its entirety.
- master opacity equally well applies to groups, again preserving the group appearance. Fill/stroke opacity is unavailable for groups.
It's especially useful in the context of having semi-transparent stops
in a gradient and then being able to adjust the object level opacity on top of that.
YOU CAN. Just select one stop and adjust it opacity, then deselect any stops and adjust the opacity of the entire object. What can be simpler? No need to remember different "kinds" of opacities, just a single opacity control that works on everything.