7:57 a.m.
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
12:54 p.m.
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
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2:39 p.m.
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,
--
bulia byak
Inkscape. Draw Freely.
http://www.inkscape.org
7:14 p.m.
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.
--
Alan
7:19 p.m.
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.
--
bulia byak
Inkscape. Draw Freely.
http://www.inkscape.org
4:57 a.m.
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/fr...
--
Alan
From MAILER-DAEMON Tue Jan 30 05:14:09 2007
Date: Tue, 30 Jan
2007 14:13:34 +0100
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Subject: [Inkscape-user] Layers dropdown, was: Baffling UI
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On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 12:43:00PM +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:
Note the best point to step in, but I deleted most of this
thread to not get angry ;)
Why not give it a try for a release, or for a while during the
unstable
time between releases?
With trying you mean removing the layer dropdown?
I use it all the time. I often have a number of layers, but work
in one layer for a while and don't switch layers that often.
If is elect something on another layer, I look down there to
see 'where' I am. The layer palette is only allowd to eat
space if I need to reorder layers.
I wouldn't be surprised about other doing the same, as this
just seems best practices to me.
Regarding clutter: as much as I like simplicity and clean looks
and having tried to streamline interfaces before ... I have
this feeling people sometimes stare at GUIs too long instead
of actuall using them.
With more information fairer judgements without
accusing people of ranting when all they have done is calmly and
reasonably put forward their opinions.
Reasonably? To over-emphasize how it sounds to me:
"I'm so pro and all thos pro applications are just like they have
to be and doing things differently is automically inferior"
Lets try to stick to arguments, not pointing elsewhere trying
to sound important (not that I didn't try that myself at times ;)
So:
- Layer dropdown takes space that could be used for something
else.
- for what?
- Dropdow could mislead new users to think its all there is.
- it's in the menus and the documentation. Users are new
to an app only once ...
- My claim of different scenarios for drodown and palette
(see above)
--
Thorsten Wilms
Thorwil's Creature Illustrations:
http://www.printfection.com/thorwil
12:24 p.m.
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
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Subject: Re: [Inkscape-user] Layers dropdown
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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
6:56 p.m.
New subject: Freehand user [was Re: Bounding boxes and patterns, cloning, etc...]
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(a)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]
--
Alan
6152
days inactive
6153
days old
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7 comments
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participants (4)
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Alan Horkan -
Andrew Mellinger -
Axiom X11 -
bulia byak