I am not a visual person.
I am not a designer, not a drawer, not a painter, not a photographer.
I'm a man of words, really, if I need to be creative, it's words.
Having said that, can I sue you for the time I've lost playing with Inkscape? No? Goddamnit.
It's wonderful. Intuitive. The 'everything should be keyboard accessible' philosophy rocks. It has everything.
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.
The next 2 hours were spent rotating and resizing stars and occasionally saying 'wow'. I shake my angry fist at you all.
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.
Daniel
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.
Just tried exporting it, and its working ok here, make sure that the export dialog is set to page, not selection, if it still doesnt work can you give us some more details, like operating system, inkscape version?
cheers
John
btw, glad you like it :)
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Quoth Daniel Klein on or about 2004-06-23:
When exporting my wonderful drawing, I get a certain problem: First couple of attempts, all was black in the png.
You problem is not a bug, but a feature :-)
You have black lines and text, but no white background. Consequently, the exported PNG is see-through apart from the black, and your viewer is obviously putting black in the see-trhough bits as well.
The simplest solution is to create a big white rectangle and put it underneath everything else.
-trent
Hello.
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 17:43, Trent Buck wrote:
Quoth Daniel Klein on or about 2004-06-23:
When exporting my wonderful drawing, I get a certain problem: First couple of attempts, all was black in the png.
You problem is not a bug, but a feature :-)
You have black lines and text, but no white background. Consequently, the exported PNG is see-through apart from the black, and your viewer is obviously putting black in the see-trhough bits as well.
The simplest solution is to create a big white rectangle and put it underneath everything else.
-trent
Or you could set the Page Background to white with 1.00 alpha. That's in Dialogs -> Document Options (in 0.38) or in File -> Document Preferences (in 0.39).
I other words, just press Shift-Ctrl-D and raise alpha to 1.00.
Greetings.
Daniel Díaz yosoy@...72...
You problem is not a bug, but a feature :-)
You have black lines and text, but no white background. Consequently, the exported PNG is see-through apart from the black, and your viewer is obviously putting black in the see-trhough bits as well.
The simplest solution is to create a big white rectangle and put it underneath everything else.
-trent
Or you could set the Page Background to white with 1.00 alpha. That's in Dialogs -> Document Options (in 0.38) or in File -> Document Preferences (in 0.39).
I other words, just press Shift-Ctrl-D and raise alpha to 1.00.
Greetings.
Daniel Díaz yosoy@...72...
Thank you very much, both of you :) The background bit worked fine.. also figured out how to work with the DPI in the export dialog. Weee! This is shiny :)
Wonderful program.. expect more stupid questions from me soon as I continue to toy around with this :)
Daniel
When exporting my wonderful drawing, I get a certain problem: First couple of attempts, all was black in the png.
Let me guess - you're using Internet Exploder to view the PNG, right? :)
(if not I apologize :)
Anyway, just go to Document Prefs and set page bacground color to be non-transparent (no need to add a rect then). By default it's fully transparent white.
bulia byak wrote:
When exporting my wonderful drawing, I get a certain problem: First couple of attempts, all was black in the png.
Let me guess - you're using Internet Exploder to view the PNG, right? :)
(if not I apologize :)
kuickshow.. apology accepted :D
It worked fine with the background bit :)
Daniel
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
Aaaaaaand an active mailing list with developers posting. God wants me to get addicted to this thing.
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.
I was about to try that out later for some more demanding designs.. I definitely thought I would need the grid for things like rectangular panel design, but I found it was so incredibly easy to do just by holding ctrl with the bezier/line tool, I never needed the grid so far. Soon as I come to more demanding pages, I'll definitely turn on grid and snapping.
Btw, would there be an easy way of doing something like "Okay, I have a page, I want there to be black horizontal line at 20%, 20%, 40% and 20% of the page height and the first row should have vertical lines at 33.333% and 33.333%."? The way I did it now was just to look at coordinates, gave the page 600 pixels width and placed the vertical lines at 200 and 400 respectively.. is there a more convenient way of doing this? Especially if the percentages and widths should become more demanding for my poor brain..
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.
[snip]
Daniel Díaz and Trent Buck wonderfully answered me already. It was just the white background of the page that was missing. Unless you think that's TOO simple, maybe we could put that into a FAQ on your Wiki? I have the unique perspective of 'clueless first time user', and boy do I feel valuable :P I'm just not too sure if that isn't TOO basic for a FAQ, which is why I haven't done anything to the Wiki yet.
Btw, for inspiration definitely check out Mental's Lunar 8 Comics: http://lunar8.rydia.net/ -- done with Inkscape and Batik.
Bryce
Oh yes I have. One of the first things I did. I asked a friend about SVG drawing programs (he has a birth defect: he knows everything. Seriously. Pulled the names sodipodi and inkscape out of his ass), so I browsed a bit and saw that comic. There went another few 'wow' moments. I was asking myself 'what great things could you do with this if you invested the time' while I was going through the two tutorials (btw, you might want to mention that 'select all' on one of the tutorials MIGHT take a while.. there was a passage that mentioned doing a select all, I tried it out with the tutorial still as my active document and Inkscape went unresponsive for ~30 seconds on my Athlon TB 1200 / 512MB RAM.. maybe it'd be good to mention that in the tutorial, of course there's a damn lot of 'all' to select), and when I saw that comic I did get a good idea of just what you can do. Except for one facial expression that just looked.. odd.. everything was damn perfect. The blurry figures moving through the forest.. wow.
You got a good piece of software going here, keep it up :)
Daniel
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Daniel Klein wrote:
Aaaaaaand an active mailing list with developers posting. God wants me to get addicted to this thing.
*Grin*
Btw, would there be an easy way of doing something like "Okay, I have a page, I want there to be black horizontal line at 20%, 20%, 40% and 20% of the page height and the first row should have vertical lines at 33.333% and 33.333%."? The way I did it now was just to look at coordinates, gave the page 600 pixels width and placed the vertical lines at 200 and 400 respectively.. is there a more convenient way of doing this? Especially if the percentages and widths should become more demanding for my poor brain..
Yes, play with the 'Align & Distribute' dialog. I find it verrrry nice for doing precision layout quickly. You don't even have to think about percentages - just draw your N lines, and make sure the top and bottom ones are at the spots you want them, then distribute/align the rest.
Daniel Díaz and Trent Buck wonderfully answered me already. It was just the white background of the page that was missing. Unless you think that's TOO simple, maybe we could put that into a FAQ on your Wiki?
Sure, go for it, good idea, the FAQ could probably use some fleshing out a bit.
I have the unique perspective of 'clueless first time user', and boy do I feel valuable :P I'm just not too sure if that isn't TOO basic for a FAQ, which is why I haven't done anything to the Wiki yet.
I doubt anything's *too* basic, but don't worry too much about getting stuff wrong in the Wiki; someone will come along later and correct if needed.
Oh yes I have. One of the first things I did. I asked a friend about SVG drawing programs (he has a birth defect: he knows everything. Seriously. Pulled the names sodipodi and inkscape out of his ass), so I browsed a bit and saw that comic. There went another few 'wow' moments. I was asking myself 'what great things could you do with this if you invested the time' while I was going through the two tutorials (btw, you might want to mention that 'select all' on one of the tutorials MIGHT take a while.. there was a passage that mentioned doing a select all, I tried it out with the tutorial still as my active document and Inkscape went unresponsive for ~30 seconds on my Athlon TB 1200 / 512MB RAM..
Yeah, others have reported that the tutorials tend to illuminate some of the performance issues we've got on some platforms. Some developers have looked at how to optimize this, so there's definitely some thinking going on there. Bulia is planning to update the tutorials prior to the release, so if the issue still exists at that time, perhaps he'll add a mention.
Bryce
Quoth Daniel Klein on or about 2004-06-23:
And an active mailing list.
Hyperactive :-) Contrasts dramatically with the other project I patronize, ratpoison, which has about 2 developers and 25 users.
Btw, would there be an easy way of doing something like "Okay, I have a page, I want there to be black horizontal line at 20%, 20%, 40% and 20% ...
I can think of three workarounds:
1) Use horizontal rules.
2) Make a bunch of lines using STAMPING, use the ALIGN/DISTRIBUTE dialog to space them evenly, then stretch them to a rule and N%.
3) Use my shitty mktable program to create a template http://yoyo.its.monash.edu.au/~trent/src/mktable--2004-06-20T0406--backup.ta... and say something like "row 10, columns 10, begin, line 2 1 2 10, line 4 1 4 10, line 6 1 6 10, end"
Maybe we should have a ruler mode that does percentages instead of mm/cm/in?
-trent
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Daniel Klein wrote:
I am not a visual person.
I am not a designer, not a drawer, not a painter, not a photographer.
I'm a man of words, really, if I need to be creative, it's words.
By the way... Something the project needs pretty desperately right now are written articles about the application. I've gotten one published (http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7241) but we need more, especially from the 'new user' perspective. If you'd have any interest in doing so, it'd sure help raise awareness of the app!
Bryce
Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Daniel Klein wrote:
I am not a visual person.
I am not a designer, not a drawer, not a painter, not a photographer.
I'm a man of words, really, if I need to be creative, it's words.
By the way... Something the project needs pretty desperately right now are written articles about the application. I've gotten one published (http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7241) but we need more, especially from the 'new user' perspective. If you'd have any interest in doing so, it'd sure help raise awareness of the app!
Bryce
The only thing I do semi-well is writing. (http://bringa.deviantart.com if you want to prove me wrong :P). The problem I see is that I won't invest a LOT of time into this.. the comic is ONE of my many projects, on the priority list it's around 5. That means I'll do the occasional page layout in inkscape and maybe sketch a scene in it as well now and then, but I can't really see myself diving much deeper into it. (although, today at work, when I had to come up with a random background image to prove that something I wrote worked on top of an image, I used inkscape to create an aesthetically pleasing background [boss: 'cool, where did you get that background from?'] and when I later had to write some geometrical algorithms and I wanted to visualize just what I was doing, I used inkscape for sketches as well.. ahum.. :P) However, I'd love to give something back to the community, and I believe that even as a non native speaker I should be able to write the odd article. Tell me what kind of audience those would be intended for and what kinds of things I should cover, and I'll be glad to help :)
Daniel
On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Daniel Klein wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
By the way... Something the project needs pretty desperately right now are written articles about the application. I've gotten one published (http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7241) but we need more, especially from the 'new user' perspective. If you'd have any interest in doing so, it'd sure help raise awareness of the app!
The only thing I do semi-well is writing. (http://bringa.deviantart.com if you want to prove me wrong :P). The problem I see is that I won't invest a LOT of time into this.. the comic is ONE of my many projects, on the priority list it's around 5. That means I'll do the occasional page layout in inkscape and maybe sketch a scene in it as well now and then, but I can't really see myself diving much deeper into it. (although, today at work, when I had to come up with a random background image to prove that something I wrote worked on top of an image, I used inkscape to create an aesthetically pleasing background [boss: 'cool, where did you get that background from?'] and when I later had to write some geometrical algorithms and I wanted to visualize just what I was doing, I used inkscape for sketches as well.. ahum.. :P) However, I'd love to give something back to the community, and I believe that even as a non native speaker I should be able to write the odd article. Tell me what kind of audience those would be intended for and what kinds of things I should cover, and I'll be glad to help :)
Sure, the audience depends on the publication you'd be shooting for, of course. OS News tends to be fairly Linux/Development oriented, so I focused my article a bit on the open source development process aspects.
An audience I think that would be worth targeting are users who aren't artists but occassionally need something aesthetically pleasing for diagrams, presentations, etc. and want to do it using Open Source tools, the same way you are. So it might explain what vector drawing is and gives some real-world examples of using Inkscape to get these kinds of jobs done. Most people understand the basics like rectangles and circles, but what about variable transparency (aka alpha blending), bezier curves (aka node editing), and so forth? For examples, you can mine the materials at openclipart.org, or I'm sure some of the other users could contribute a piece or two.
A good time to shoot for with an article would be after the 0.39 release is out.
Bryce
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.
For cartoon work, you may eventually want to do text bubbles. They're easy to make:
1. Draw an ellipse, box, star, or box-with-curved-corners 2. Draw a curvy triangle type shape 3. Set the fill for both of the above to white and border to a black stroke 4. Make the two shapes overlap 5. Select both the shapes and do Path->Union
Getting the text to fit within the bubble is a bit more challenging... I find it's easier to write the text first, and then make the bubbles match the size subsequently.
Bryce
Quoth Bryce Harrington on or about 2004-06-22:
For cartoon work, you may eventually want to do text bubbles.
Maybe this could be expanded into a module kinda like we have already for markers (arrow head & tails).
...One thing I'd love to be able to use Inkscape for is Dia/Visio style diagrams. ATM it's a tough decision between a Inkscape's superb interface and a Dia's slightly better flowchat support.
-trent
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Trent Buck wrote:
Quoth Bryce Harrington on or about 2004-06-22:
For cartoon work, you may eventually want to do text bubbles.
Maybe this could be expanded into a module kinda like we have already for markers (arrow head & tails).
Possibly, although honestly I found making them by hand to be a snap, and allows for a wide range of flexibility...
The thing that feels missing to make this perfect is to be able to attach the text to the bubble, and flow the text in a way that fits within the bubble's boundaries.
...One thing I'd love to be able to use Inkscape for is Dia/Visio style diagrams. ATM it's a tough decision between a Inkscape's superb interface and a Dia's slightly better flowchat support.
You and me both... For bread and butter functional diagrams that you actually use as part of your software development process, dia is pretty good and quick, but it really falls down hard when you want to make pretty diagrams for a paper or a presentation. Inkscape does well for the latter, but it takes a bit of time to get all the bits right. The one major barrier to use - lack of arrowheads - has been eliminated, but there's still a number of features needed before it can honestly be considered usable for diagramming. However, given the rate of accumulation of new features, plus the strong interest in diagram support among the developers and users, I think it's inevitable that we'll get there; it'll be pretty sweet when we do!
I would probably say for 'plain old diagramming' purposes, the next key feature we need would probably either be symbol libraries or wrapped-text-in-a-box. We need text-in-box capability for a lot of other stuff too. Line autorouting and line breaks (for where two lines overlap) will also be needed. I think if we had those four features, then Inkscape would probably have the edge over dia for most diagramming needs.
Bryce
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 23:06, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Possibly, although honestly I found making them by hand to be a snap, and allows for a wide range of flexibility...
The thing that feels missing to make this perfect is to be able to attach the text to the bubble, and flow the text in a way that fits within the bubble's boundaries.
I use groups for that purpose (put the bubble and the text in a group together), though it doesn't currently flow text automagically.
Note that (thanks to bulia) the text tool can be used to directly edit text inside of groups, so this is very convenient.
-mental
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, MenTaLguY wrote:
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 23:06, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Possibly, although honestly I found making them by hand to be a snap, and allows for a wide range of flexibility...
The thing that feels missing to make this perfect is to be able to attach the text to the bubble, and flow the text in a way that fits within the bubble's boundaries.
I use groups for that purpose (put the bubble and the text in a group together), though it doesn't currently flow text automagically.
Note that (thanks to bulia) the text tool can be used to directly edit text inside of groups, so this is very convenient.
Yeah I noticed that there'd been some improvements to the text editing; hadn't tried editing it in a group, that does help a ton.
Dang, we almost need a graphical ReleaseNotes to show off all the new features. :-)
Bryce
Quoth Bryce Harrington on or about 2004-06-22:
I would probably say for 'plain old diagramming' purposes, the next key feature we need would probably either be symbol libraries or wrapped-text-in-a-box. We need text-in-box capability for a lot of other stuff too. Line autorouting and line breaks (for where two lines overlap) will also be needed. I think if we had those four features, then Inkscape would probably have the edge over dia for most diagramming needs.
I would define the two key elements as:
* anchoring text element to an object (polygons & paths) -- what you called `text-in-a-box'.
* anchoring path head & tail to object edges.
so that when you move them around, the anchored vertices move too.
I'm imagining rather than dia's arbitrary-point attachment model, you could anchor it N units along the path, then move the anchor the way you round rectangles now.
But don't look at me to code it anytime soon :-)
As for symbol libraries, they'll accumulate as users need them -- all it needs (to begin with) is a corner of the wiki.
-trent
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Trent Buck wrote:
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 11:08:56 +1000 From: Trent Buck <fubarbaz@...104...> Reply-To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-user] Exporting question
Quoth Bryce Harrington on or about 2004-06-22:
For cartoon work, you may eventually want to do text bubbles.
Maybe this could be expanded into a module kinda like we have already for markers (arrow head & tails).
Generic text bubble tools would be great.
...One thing I'd love to be able to use Inkscape for is Dia/Visio style diagrams. ATM it's a tough decision between a Inkscape's superb interface and a Dia's slightly better flowchat support.
People also praise Dia for its typesetting. Dia already uses Pango and there are a variety of TeX tricks that you do with Dia that I'm assured are very useful and have been used by several book authors. Dia already does layers. Dia has a whole lot of Selection tools, although I expect Inkscape will soon gain many of these features.
I can assure you the Dia developers/maintainers are very receptive to patches.
If you have an interface improvement you would like to make to Dia please do send patches, filing a bug report might also be a good idea but patches are particularly welcome. (Dia has long had the option of a menubar in the document window, even before the GIMP or Inkscape, the developers are more than happy to let users have what the want and let them get the job done).
I jokingly used the subject line "Dia versus Inkscape" but really I'd like to be able to use both and have Dia focus on flow charting and diagramming from preset shapes and have Inkscape for creating original shapes and generally more creative drawing rather than structured diagramming.
I say Dia maintainers because Dia has no where near the amount of active developers that Inkscape has so opportunities for shared infrastructure would benefit both projects. Read on if you are interested in the various ways that you could help if you were interested.
Dia uses a subset of SVG for its Shape files, and if someone helped improve the SVG support in Dia it would make direct interoperability easier or alternatively adding an exporter to Inkscape would be great (authoring shape files in Dia is not fun at all).
Dia can open DXF (autocad) files, and Xfig files, as well as export to DXF, CGM, EPS, HPGL, PNG, TeX, SVG, WPG. If Inkscape were to use/share and help develop any of those libraries it would be of significant benifit to both projects. (Dia for Windows also uses the Windows GDI to export to WMF).
Even better would be a standardised interface for Vector Graphics programs analagous to what GDKpixbuf does for Raster graphics would benefit all GTK applications not just Dia or Inkscape.
It is part of the Inkscape developement roadmap to devolve the Vector Canvas back to GTK. When that happens Dia would be a prime candidate to use it, the rotation features will be particularly welcome as they were something no one particularly wanted to add just for Dia.
I'm sure there are plenty more other ideas I have not mentioned. Unfortunately I have more time and ideas than I do ability to implement them. If you have questions about Dia feel free to ask me offlist and I'll do my best to answer them.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Microsoft could shit in a box and most people would buy it.
I've used Microsoft Works too ;)
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 18:27, 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.
As a matter of interest, I got started as a developer with Sodipodi and subsequently co-founded Inkscape because of a comic project I was doing in Sodipodi (an now Inkscape).
Though ... overall I seem to have gotten more work done on Inkscape than on the comic. Go figure. :P
-mental
participants (8)
-
Alan Horkan -
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
Daniel Díaz -
Daniel Klein -
John Cliff -
MenTaLguY -
Trent Buck