I have some ideas for Inkscape that I've gathered during my daily use. I use 0.46 on Windows Vista (sometimes 0.47pre1), danish version. I have looked in the forum, in 0.47pre1 and on launchpad to see if some of my ideas have already been requested, but I might have missed something.

#1 Size of draggable UI-elemens bigger: It would be nice if you could change the size of the handles, vertices and so on. I feel they are too small with bigger screen resolutions.

#2 Connect path: If an object has to end-points, pressing, let's say Ctrl + Enter/Return connects those two ends.

#3 Multiline palette: Make the palette multiline so you can have more colours available on the screen.

#4 Import more than one file: I guess this is a bug, but I have problems when importing more than one file. Only one shows up.

#5 Disable blur (or other effects): Blur really slows down everything. It would be nice to be able to turn it of temporarily. Perhaps selecting which layers to disable like with visibility and lock.

#6 Layer functions on status line: The layer functions on the status line (is it called that? I'm talking about those buttons and drop down located on the bottom of the screen) is really great, but it would be much more efficient if the hide and lock buttons was placed next to every layer in the drop down. Then you could show one layer and hide another (which I do quite often) so much faster.

#7 Easier way to hide objects: It is very cumbersome to make an object hidden (right click, properties and hide). I use it when an object is in the way, often when I have to gather colours with the eyedropper or the snapping gets caught by other objects than the intended.

#8 Shortcuts for removing fill/stroke: A shortcut for removing fill and one for removing stroke would be very nice (perhaps I am the only one who does that a lot).

#9 Creating clones: The way you can create copies by dragging and pressing space is so cool. It would be nice if it could create clones of the dragged object as well.

#10 Distort path: There might be a way to do this, but it would be nice to have perhaps a LPE to distort a path.

#11 Stich Sub-Paths: If I want to randomize the spacing between the sub-paths, I can only do it on start and end vertices which makes the sub-paths oblique, which is not what I want. I want the lines created to be straight I this this for speed-lines when creating comics.

#12 Split fill and stroke: Something I use VERY often, that is many times a day. If I want to delete specific edges of and object, but keep the fill where it is, I need to create a copy and make one copy have fill and the other have stroke. Now I can delete the edges I want. It works fine, but creating a copy and removing fill and stroke is a bit tiresome when you do it a lot. It would be nice to have a function that could do this, my day would be so much better

Steps for the above function:

1. Create a copy of selected object (which has to have both a fill and stroke).
2. Remove stroke from bottom object.
3. Remove fill from top object.

Sorry about the elaboration, but it would be so cool to have this function

#13 Draw vertices you want to select: Blender has something like this. By pressing B two times in mesh edit (I think, I haven't really used Blender) you get a brush you can use to select vertices.

#14 Clones on a surface: Select an object as surface and an object as the one you want to clone. Spread this on the surface. Can be used for grass and things like that.


That would be what I have gathered so far. I understand that there are much more important matters to attend to, but sometimes small changes and features can really improve your experience. I used to use GIMP for my drawings, but Inkscape and vector graphic in general has so many advantages impossible to ignore, so now I am using Ink for everything!


Mark Jensen
smilinger.dk

These all seem like fine ideas. Here are some comments on individual items. These comments all relate to the dev version. I'm not sure which features are in 0.46.

3. You can make the palette multiline. Look for the small arrow to the right of the palette. Click it, and a menu opens up. At the top of the menu, select the "Wrap" option. The palette should now be two lines tall, giving double the number of colors on-screen.

5. You can tell Inkscape to spend less time rendering filter effects like blur with a preference setting. Look in the Inkscape preferences under Filters, (or in 0.46 in might be Blur Quality or something.)

8. Do you mean a keyboard shortcut for removing fill and one for stroke? There are two easy ways to remove them with the mouse. The first item in the palette is a white box with a red X, which removes either fill or stroke just like clicking any other palette color. Another way is to middle click your mouse on either the Fill color box or the Stroke color box down in the lower left corner of the screen.

13. This mode already exists for the regular selection tool (by pressing Alt and drawing a selection line), so it makes sense to have it in the Node tool as well.

14. You can do something like this with a bit of setup using the Tile Clones dialog. Use the Trace tab, pick Color, and apply it to Presence. It's not perfect, but playing around with the settings can get you close, and then you could clip it to make sure there are no overruns. The main problem with trying to do this with any method at the moment is that when you start creating hundreds or thousands of objects (like grass), Inkscape slows to a crawl, in my experience.

kelan:

#3 Ah, I think it works now after I reopened Inkscape.

#5 Great, I didn't notice that. Do you know if it uses best quality when exporting?

#8 Yes, I meant keyboard shortcuts

#14 I will try that, thanks!

Sorry about double post.


About #8. It works much better in 0.47. In 0.46 you had to right click Fill or Stroke at the bottom of the scren and select Remove fill. Having a "no color"-color in the palette works great.

markjensen wrote:#2 Connect path: If an object has to end-points, pressing, let's say Ctrl + Enter/Return connects those two ends.

select the open path, switch to the bezier tool, hover over one end node (and read the status line), click, hover over the other end node (again follow the hints in the status line) and click -> path closed (tested with Inkscape 0.47pre)

markjensen wrote:#5 Disable blur (or other effects): Blur really slows down everything. It would be nice to be able to turn it of temporarily. Perhaps selecting which layers to disable like with visibility and lock.

Why not use 'View > Display Mode > No Filters'? (tested with Inkscape 0.47pre)

markjensen wrote:#10 Distort path: There might be a way to do this, but it would be nice to have perhaps a LPE to distort a path.

How does this differ from the 'Bend' or 'Envelope Deformation' LPE? (tested with Inkscape 0.47pre)

markjensen wrote:#14 Clones on a surface: Select an object as surface and an object as the one you want to clone. Spread this on the surface. Can be used for grass and things like that.

Besides the very powerful 'Tiled Clones…' tool: AFAIU Inkscape doesn't have surfaces - it's a vector based application: paths have attributes like fill and stroke. Patterns can be used in these attributes instead of flat color or gradient and can be created 'on-the-fly' (menu 'Object > Pattern').
Or you can copy any shape or path to the clipboard and use it as vector-based 'brush' shape with the pencil (freehand) and calligraphic/pen (bezier/straight lines) tool. (tested with Inkscape 0.47pre)

hth, ~suv

suv:

I know it's possible to close a shape, but I think it's more convenient to have a shortcut like you have in other applications.

No Filters-mode wasn't in 0.46, but it's great to hear (and see) that it is in 0.47(pre1)!

By surface I mean some random shape. But I guess you know that. I wanted to randomly distribute a shape on the chosen surface-shape like tiled clones, but within the area of the surface (surface might not be the correct word, I am sorry for that).

markjensen wrote:I know it's possible to close a shape, but I think it's more convenient to have a shortcut like you have in other applications.

Sorry - I didn't read your proposal carefully enough.

markjensen wrote:By surface I mean some random shape. But I guess you know that. I wanted to to randomly distribute a shape on the chosen surface-shape like tiled clones, but within the area of the surface

I understood what you meant and agree it is a missing feature.

There may be different workarounds - for example the chosen shape could be a clipping path and to randomly distribute (many small, maybe cloned) objects you could use the tweak tool with the mode 'Move objects in random directions' - (and you have tried this one already, I'm sure ;-) - but the idea could warrant its own extension, maybe 'Distribute inside Path…' or 'Scatter inside Path…', analog to 'Pattern along Path…' and 'Scatter…'.

#2 I still don't know enough about how this program works, but it should be quite simple to make a shortcut for this as long as the action is setup correctly. suv isn't there a file in the opensource download that lists all available actions?

#4 I don't get this problem, maybe it depends on the format of the image you are importing.

#8 I've been asking if there was something like this. The Paste Style action is the closest I could find, and for what I'm currently working on it does the trick.

Pureon wrote:isn't there a file in the opensource download that lists all available actions?

I had listed some of the 'verbs'-sources in a previous comment:

• Inkscape command line options: inkscape --verb-list
• share/keys/default.xml
• src/verbs.cpp, src/verbs.h

and in another comment some info to keys/default.xml and KeySyms (GTK+/X11)

I might not be looking at this correctly, but there doesn't seem to be an action which removes fill or stroke. But 0.47 really doesn't make it THAT necessary (although I prefer using the keyboard instead of the mouse).

Another thing. Why is the most difficult shortcuts the ones that are displayed? Shift + F6 for bezier. I used to press that until I discovered the much easier "B"-shortcut. And now I realize that 0.47pre1 doesn't display any shortcuts (left toolbar).

markjensen wrote:Another thing. Why is the most difficult shortcuts the ones that are displayed? Shift + F6 for bezier. I used to press that until I discovered the much easier "B"-shortcut.

It's strange, but that's the way they are scripted in the xml.

@suv: Thanks for posting those links.

I haven't been able to add a shortcut for connecting the ends of a path, or for an easy way to hide objects. But I have created shortcuts for #5 (no filters) so you no longer need to go to view->display mode (and another shortcut to go back to normal view).

I've also created a shortcut that will unhide all objects in a layer, a shortcut that will unlock all objects in a layer, a shortcut that will unhide all objects in the document (any layer), and a shortcut that will unlock all objects in a document (any layer).

I don't quite understand why there are no actions to lock or hide objects, but there are actions to unlock and unhide objects?

markjensen wrote:And now I realize that 0.47pre1 doesn't display any shortcuts (left toolbar).

This has been brought up several times in the mailing lists (there might even be a bug report), but I never read an explanation what had happened. It could be an upstream issue due to changes in the GTK+ libraries or they got lost with the improved toolbox, but I'm not sure - keyboard shortcut commands seem to be missing in the tooltips across all platforms ;-(

markjensen wrote:Why is the most difficult shortcuts the ones that are displayed?

I don't know - the keyboard and mouse reference lists both default shortcuts right in the top section 'Tools' (the list hasn't been updated for 0.47 yet). OTOH it looks like the choice for the function keys helps to keep the ui consistent across platforms and for international keyboard layouts - f1 to f12 always are at the top of the keyboard and unlikely to be remapped, whereas one-character shortcuts ideally are language dependent abbreviations and more likely to be used by those (advanced) users that do not need the tool tips hints any more.

There is the flag 'display="true"' in 'keys/default.xml': you can change in your user shortcut definitions to override the default. Or... as written elsewhere ;-) - writeup all your ui proposals and e.g. add a blueprint in launchpad or for single, annoying items create a bug report (aka RFE or wishlist item) with an attached mockup, alternative shortcut definitions file...

Pureon wrote:I don't quite understand why there are no actions to lock or hide objects, but there are actions to unlock and unhide objects

There are many open issues with the short cut definitions - other short cuts like the 'move', 'rotate' and 'scale' selection can't be remapped (my pet peeve) and the underlying concept in default.xml of 'keys' and 'modifiers' is logically flawed in my eyes. But nevertheless in most cases it works, even with other keyboard layouts than the standard/extended U.S. PC/AT ;-)

markjensen wrote:#14 Clones on a surface: Select an object as surface and an object as the one you want to clone. Spread this on the surface. Can be used for grass and things like that.

Could this blueprint for a Spray Tool be what you have in mind? As far as I know a group of students has worked on this and even implemented a working version in a branch of Inkscape, but I have not searched the inkscape-devel mailing list archives about the current status. I only know that it will not be included in Inkscape 0.47.

[edit time="a few minutes later"]
I did a quick subject search - here are some links to discussions on the mailing list:
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/27419>
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/28479>
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/30077>
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/30136>
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/30273>
[/edit]

suv (about the spray tool): It's not exactly what I had in mind, but it sounds like a great extension that could do the trick. Right now I am cloning (groups of) objects and editing the z-order manually. I tried to use the Restack-extension in 0.47pre, but I can only make it work if I make a new document and use it on a small number of objects (perhaps the asymtotic running time is really high for the algorithm used? I don't know). It doesn't really make sense, because Python seems to be quite inactive, so I have yet to come up with the exact scenarios where it doesn't work.


Pureon: Thanks for your effort, but without having shortcuts for hiding (and locking), there's almost no point in having unhide and unlock (for me, at least)


This is a little off-topic, but are you also having problems with the bezier-tool in 0.47pre? When I convert vertices to smooth, some of them acts like they are still corner (crusp?).