Bounding boxes and patterns, cloning, etc...
Greetings!
I am a long time Freehand user (still using Fh8 on the mac) and I am trying to switch to Inkscape. I playing with it for a few hours last weekend and I have a few questions.
FH8 used to have 'replicate' and used to remember the offset of duplicate options so one could easily duplicate a set of things over and over. For example, if I wanted to build a grid, I could draw a line then duplicate it once placing it in the right place then hit the duplicate key over and over.
I've been trying this with patterns and cloning and I have problems with bounding boxes. It looks like the tiling wants to tile base on bounding box, but the box is outside of the actual area by some amount like the size of miters, or lines or soemthing. i.e. The bounding box doesn't bound to the node points, but to the line. This makes it impossible (as far as I can tell) to make a pinstripe pattern.
Anyone encountered things like this before?
I'm using Inkscape 0.44.
Thanks for any help!
-Andrew
The way I do it is just paste a lot of things all over, and then use the align tools.
Inkscape tends to paste things wherever your cursor is (can be handy).
On 1/29/07, Andrew Mellinger <andrew@...2091...> wrote:
Greetings!
I am a long time Freehand user (still using Fh8 on the mac) and I am trying to switch to Inkscape. I playing with it for a few hours last weekend and I have a few questions.
FH8 used to have 'replicate' and used to remember the offset of duplicate options so one could easily duplicate a set of things over and over. For example, if I wanted to build a grid, I could draw a line then duplicate it once placing it in the right place then hit the duplicate key over and over.
I've been trying this with patterns and cloning and I have problems with bounding boxes. It looks like the tiling wants to tile base on bounding box, but the box is outside of the actual area by some amount like the size of miters, or lines or soemthing. i.e. The bounding box doesn't bound to the node points, but to the line. This makes it impossible (as far as I can tell) to make a pinstripe pattern.
Anyone encountered things like this before?
I'm using Inkscape 0.44.
Thanks for any help!
-Andrew
Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=D... _______________________________________________ Inkscape-user mailing list Inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-user
On 1/29/07, Andrew Mellinger <andrew@...2091...> wrote:
I've been trying this with patterns and cloning and I have problems with bounding boxes. It looks like the tiling wants to tile base on bounding box, but the box is outside of the actual area by some amount like the size of miters, or lines or soemthing. i.e. The bounding box doesn't bound to the node points, but to the line. This makes it impossible (as far as I can tell) to make a pinstripe pattern.
So, does Freehand ignore stroke when displaying bounding box? We are thinking about providing this as an optional mode too, so if it does, it will be another reason to do so. The stroke-inclusive bbox is better for artistic uses and for newbies, but technical users seem to prefer a bbox without stroke.
Also, we don't have many Freehand users on this list, so I would really welcome any feedback you can give about Inkscape from the viewpoint of a Freehand user. What features are you missing the most? What UI elements you hate/love the most? etc.
As for your problem, in the clone tiler you can set any interval between clones, including a negative interval which can be set to negate the stroke width. Even simpler, you can temporarily remove stroke from the object, tile it, and then add stroke back to the original (all clones will be updated). With patterns, unfortunately there's currently no UI to set the positive/negative intervals between copies of the pattern - SVG allows this but we just didn't code it yet. But here, too, you can work around this by making a pattern out of an object without stroke, then opening the XML editor, going to svg:defs, then to the svg:pattern that you are using, then inside it select the object and, in its style attribute, change "stroke:none" to, for example, "stroke:black" and set the desired stroke-width. After that the pattern copies will be still aligned at their strokeless bboxes but they will now have strokes (overlapping at the pattern boundaries).
Hope this helps,
On Mon, 29 Jan 2007, bulia byak wrote:
Also, we don't have many Freehand users on this list, so I would really welcome any feedback you can give about Inkscape from the viewpoint of a Freehand user. What features are you missing the most? What UI elements you hate/love the most? etc.
The Inset/Outset tools in freehand are much better. A small dialog is provided and you can choose to Inset X number of times with a given offset.
Freehand has seperate tools for Ellipse and Arc unlike Inkscape, which avoids some fiddling but I'm not sure it would be worth copying. The reflect tool is quite interesting, it shows a line about which the current object would be reflected and it shows the reflection and you can interactively rotate the line and the reflection moves too.
I'd be surprised if users didn't miss some of the Zoom keybindings from Freehand which inkscape doesn't have verbs for yet and so cannot be supported in the freehand style keybindings.
Macromedia products are built off of vector engines, and so strangely Fireworks actually has some vector shape drawing tools that are better than freehand, such as those for drawing arrows, or a torus (donut) shape.
I expect Inkscape already makes a lot of things from Freehand possible but streamline and the subtle details will be harder to copy.
On 1/29/07, Alan Horkan <horkana@...3...> wrote:
The Inset/Outset tools in freehand are much better. A small dialog is provided and you can choose to Inset X number of times with a given offset.
Try our Inset/Outset Halo extension which does exactly this.
On Mon, 29 Jan 2007, bulia byak wrote:
On 1/29/07, Alan Horkan <horkana@...3...> wrote:
The Inset/Outset tools in freehand are much better. A small dialog is provided and you can choose to Inset X number of times with a given offset.
Try our Inset/Outset Halo extension which does exactly this.
A good start but it is only creating one Inset at the moment (Inkscape 0.45+devel, built Jan 25 2007) and maybe it is working as the developer intended but it is not working as I might have expected. Hopefully when this gets better we wont need both this tool and the seperate inset/outset menu items (although I'm sure the underlying verbs will stay).
The menu label could be improved by removing the slash (or can be implied) instead simply labelling it "Inset Outset Halo". (This is similar to my previous comments on how inkscape didn't need to punctuate "Layer(s)" and how it was more elegant to simply write Layer and imply one-or-more.)
Old screenshot of freehand inset tool for comparison http://www.vecpix.com/tutorials/freehand/images/fh006/chrome12.gif and in context as provided by google image search http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.vecpix.com/tutorials/freeh...
On 1/29/07, Andrew Mellinger <andrew@...2091...> wrote:
I've been trying this with patterns and cloning and I have problems with bounding boxes. It looks like the tiling wants to tile base on bounding box, but the box is outside of the actual area by some amount like the size of miters, or lines or soemthing. i.e. The bounding box doesn't bound to the node points, but to the line. This makes it impossible (as far as I can tell) to make a pinstripe pattern.
So, does Freehand ignore stroke when displaying bounding box?
I'll need to find a version of classic to fire up to get FH8 working. The big thing is that I don't really remember being that aware of the bounding box in FH8. By being aware I mean it was never an issue or impacted my drawing. Let me give you an example:
I have two rectangles with large strokes and I'm using grid snap. When I drag them side by side so that two edges align the grid snap has those two edges overlap. Thus you have a wide rectangle with a single line down the middle, but the line is the normal stroke width.
That frustrated me about Inkscape at first, until I turned off bounding box snap and turned on node snap.
We are thinking about providing this as an optional mode too, so if it does, it will be another reason to do so. The stroke-inclusive bbox is better for artistic uses and for newbies, but technical users seem to prefer a bbox without stroke.
When it really gets right down to it, I don't care too much about bounding boxes, I just wanted to get the pattern/clone issue to work right. I suppose my ultimate desire is that things follow the principle of least astonishment. Thus if I draw a line diagonally across a grid cell then tile it or pattern it, I expect it to basically fill the other adjacent grid cells identically. I suppose that is the easiest way to explain my expectation. But I'm fully aware that this may not be what normal people do. ;)
Also, we don't have many Freehand users on this list, so I would really welcome any feedback you can give about Inkscape from the viewpoint of a Freehand user. What features are you missing the most? What UI elements you hate/love the most? etc.
It has been a while since I've used it heavily, I'll try to refresh myself and provide some better input.
What I miss the most is the duplicate command that remembers offsets. In FH8 it would work like this: Duplicate and the new item is place at some x,y offset. (Which is configured in user prefs.) The duplicate object is automatically selected. If the duplicate is moved (e.g. draegged) somewhere, then the duplicate command is done again, the third object would have the same offset relative to the second that the second currently has the first. This makes it really easy to create copies with arbitrary spacing. This wouldn't be too hard to do in Inkscape. If the clone option simply created the next clone at the difference between itself and originator, you'd have the same effect. And it would be a lot faster / more intuitive than the clone dialog. Maybe it does this now, but I didn't think so. I'll go back and check. Maybe I'm thinking of duplicate doesn't do this.
Another thing I miss is the idea of 'last defaut' vs current object prefs. Let's say I create a new box, then bring up the fill/stroke dialog and set the stroke dash style. Then I draw another box. Normally I expect the next box to follow a default not the one I just modified. If I don't have any objects selected when I call up the frame/set (object info in other apps) then I can modify the 'defaults' for the tool. This is also done in OmniGraffle. They go as far as to make the tool selection be a popup menu that retains the most recently used styles. This is a lot more work and can be handled more easily through just keeping a lot default objects around and copying them so isn't that big of a deal.
I remember also that some app (I'm pretty sure FH8) had the ability to option (alt) click on objects to select the one beneath. I couldn't find that in Inkscape. This is great if you have a lot of stacked objects and need to work down thorugh the stack. Just keep option clicking down until you get the one you want. Of course this feature may be there, I just didn't see it.
BTW: The little modifier key tooltips at the bottom of the window totally rock.
As for your problem, in the clone tiler you can set any interval between clones, including a negative interval which can be set to negate the stroke width.
I will try this and the ideas for removing the stroke and see which is easier! I'm sure one of these will work. Thanks!
-Andrew
From MAILER-DAEMON Tue Jan 30 12:41:07 2007
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:40:29 +0100 From: Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@...1631...> To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Message-ID: <20070130204028.GC5453@...1906...> References: <3c78ff030701291629k78763b24hed1251738576d765@...156...> <Pine.BSF.4.58L0.0701300318000.32474@...4...> <3c78ff030701291958r8dc021fra4eef162fdd0d55e@...156...> <6d21d8d30701292027j369c3029o1adc8ec43528ef26@...156...> <3c78ff030701292035l1df9e3bekb48f4413aa3a2d26@...156...> <Pine.BSF.4.58L0.0701301239450.24567@...4...> <20070130131334.GA5453@...1906...> <Pine.BSF.4.58L0.0701301612530.36487@...4...> <20070130170649.GB5453@...1906...> <20070130195936.GD10720@...983...> MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20070130195936.GD10720@...983...> Priority: normal X-Mailer: Mutt User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11) X-Spam-Score: 0.0 (/) X-Spam-Report: Spam Filtering performed by sourceforge.net. See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details. Report problems to http://sf.net/tracker/?func%C2%ADd&group_id=1&atid 0001 Subject: Re: [Inkscape-user] Layers dropdown X-BeenThere: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.8 Precedence: list Reply-To: t_w_@...1631..., Inkscape User Community inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net List-Id: Inkscape User Community <inkscape-user.lists.sourceforge.net> List-Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-user, mailto:inkscape-user-request@lists.sourceforge.net?subject=unsubscribe List-Archive: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=inkscape-user List-Post: mailto:inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net List-Help: mailto:inkscape-user-request@lists.sourceforge.net?subject=help List-Subscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-user, mailto:inkscape-user-request@lists.sourceforge.net?subject=subscribe X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:41:08 -0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Disposition: inline
On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 11:59:36AM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
But this makes me wonder if the status bar could benefit from some sort of adaptive ui behavior or perhaps just a configuration setting? For new users, the layer dropdown (among other things) could initially just be scary clutter, so clearing off the status bar in favor of status messages could make the application >look< a lot more approachable. Then, later once they've gotten more comfortable, they could graduate into expert mode and have these extra accessories turned on.
All texts I ever read regarding usability that touch this topic advice against such modes.
- Implementation effort - Options need to go somewhere - Need to be documented - Related to the 2 above: discoverability. It's not likely that you find what you didn't look for. Forming expectations and searching for features is extra work. - how is a user supposed to know when he's ready for any kind of advanced mode? - if the app tries to judge the user, it can only fail and will appear unpredictable. - if you change any behaviour, user has to learn again.
/me rereads ... Well, so much on modes and adaptive behaviour :) Just having show/hide for some more stuff should be ok. Always opens the question what to show per default. I don't care about pointer coordinates ... but they don't bother me so that I didn't even check if I can hide them already.
-- Thorsten Wilms
On Mon, 29 Jan 2007, Andrew Mellinger wrote:
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:57:14 -0800 (PST) From: Andrew Mellinger <andrew@...2091...> To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-user] Bounding boxes and patterns, cloning, etc...
Greetings!
I am a long time Freehand user (still using Fh8 on the mac) and I am trying to switch to Inkscape. I playing with it for a few hours last weekend and I have a few questions.
Excellent, a Freehand refugee.
Quick question have you tried out the Freehand style keybindings?
If not and you just used the current Inkscape defaults how well were you able to adjust to them and were there anything keybindings you found particularly hard to get used to?
[There is no Graphical user interface for switching keybinding sets yet, for now see the folder inkscape\share\keys\ and rename macromedia-freehand-mx.xml so that it replaces the file default.xml]
participants (4)
-
Alan Horkan -
Andrew Mellinger -
Axiom X11 -
bulia byak