CALLIGRAPHY TOOL: Sliders should be considered a regression

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 1:15 AM, Troy James Sobotka <email address hidden>
> Summary: Despite trying to love and adore the new sliders, they simply
> don't offer the granularity that the older spin boxes did. It was
> previously simple to specify 2.0 for a value, for example.

I can easily drag to 2.6. Or I can right-click and choose 3. I can add
2 to the right-click menu if you want.

What other exact values you need? More importantly, why and when do
you need to set calligraphic width precisely at all? This is an
extremely imprecise tool by its very nature.

Static values with pressure off works well to match an arbitrarily sized stroke in a typeface.

It is at least as noticeable in Tremor and Drag. Changing values in Drag, for example, often means shifting from the decimal values between 2 and 3 or between 4 and 5. With the sliders, this is a painful, if not impossible, task to do efficiently.

Hope this clears things up.

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Troy James Sobotka
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Static values with pressure off works well to match an arbitrarily sized
> stroke in a typeface.

Yes, but you still cannot pre-calculate what Width value you need to
set. You can only get the match by experimenting. The slider didn't
change that. If there's not enough precision for experimenting, just
zoom in closer, then the same slider move will correspond to smaller
width change. I'm planning to add an on-canvas pen width indicator
which will make it easier to match width visually by left-right
arrows. By the way left/right arrows still work for fine Width
adjustments - the slider does not update but it's a bug that we'll
fix.

> It is at least as noticeable in Tremor and Drag. Changing values in
> Drag, for example, often means shifting from the decimal values between
> 2 and 3 or between 4 and 5. With the sliders, this is a painful, if not
> impossible, task to do efficiently.

Several possibilities here: we can decrease the upper limit of Mass
thus improving its sensitivity for small values; we can make this
parameter's slider exponential; and we can add more presets for small
values if you need them often (it already has 2). Or any combination
of these. No need to lose the slider convenience.

--
bulia byak
Inkscape. Draw Freely.
http://www.inkscape.org

I am no one to question the development of the system nor the developer's chosen direction.

This bug is a purely selfish one. I cannot with ease shift the values in a manner that I used to. I find the sliders quite a bit slower than the original 'pop in the value and draw'.

I change my values an awful lot while drawing, and I am often flipping between known values.

That said, I'm willing to try anything to see if I can make it work.

Matching a width with an on-canvas width adjustment would probably work wonderfully for the width.

The drag is a much more fussy one, and I simply wish I could adjust the granularity on the slider so that I can hit every value. I _do_ appreciate the ability to slide from 1-100. That is absolutely terrific. The only unfortunate thing that I have had is that the sliders greatly adjusted the workflow -- which is in part the a byproduct of evolution. My workflow is extremely fast at this point as I have done a lot of work with Inkscape. Unfortunately, I find it frustrating trying to pop that slider around to get to x.2 or y.7 -- as I am never in the whole number values. I apologize in advance for my fussy silly business, but alas, that is how I have come to work within Inkscape.

I also cannot zoom in as I have set my prefs to a fixed value and further, the blurring I use generally would greatly break up the speed at which I used to operate.

The best of what I could hope for is that someone might be able to get to _every_ value on that slider. If we can do that from a single view without zooming, I would be dearly content. The rest I can work on integration into the workflow.

Is it possible then to have 1) all values accessed via slider (hotkey to get greater granularity maybe?) _and_ even better in conjunction with that, 2) the ability to bookmark a settings batch to a preset selector or two or three?

Great work bbyak. Don't read this as a criticism but more an attempt to flow with the evolution. Thanks again. Your work is greatly appreciated, especially the love you give to the Calligraphy / Freehand tool.

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 9:10 PM, Troy James Sobotka
<email address hidden> wrote:
> byproduct of evolution. My workflow is extremely fast at this point as
> I have done a lot of work with Inkscape. Unfortunately, I find it
> frustrating trying to pop that slider around to get to x.2 or y.7 -- as
> I am never in the whole number values.

Right, the fractional part is annoying. And you're not likely to ever
_feel_ the difference between e.g. 14.4 and 14. So I just removed the
fractional part, now what you see above the slider is always a whole
number between 1 and 100.

> Is it possible then to have 1) all values accessed via slider (hotkey to
> get greater granularity maybe?)

Are you sure you really need every of the 100 values? We can give them
to you but only by making the slider about twice longer than it is.
Most likely you use a number of "convenient" values, like 2, 10, 50,
etc. All of them are in the right-click menu. Most are also easy to
drag to, maybe not entirely precisely but the error should be
noticeable. Again, if you think that e.g. the 1..10 range is more
important than 10..100, let's make it logarithmic, so that 1..10 takes
a half of the range and 10.100 takes the other half. It's easy to do,
though you will have to re-adjust to the new meaning of the numbers,
e.g. that 20 is now a small mass about the same as 5 before, and 50 is
similar to the old 10, etc.

>_and_ even better in conjunction with
> that, 2) the ability to bookmark a settings batch to a preset selector
> or two or three?

Sure. You already have it for Calligraphic - the presets list on the
left with the Save button. Right now broken though :) I'll fix it.

Unstable GIMP 2.7 has a new widget that combines label, slider and spinbox and is rather compact. IMO, it's worth having a look at.

I agree with Alexandre. I think the new widget they have really is a "best of both worlds" type solution. If I recall, Darktable has similar widgets however the right-click behavior is different from what I remember. Both are worth looking at.

Completely agree.

Blender implemented this years ago during the migration to 2.5x lineage. It's a wise move.

The precision afforded by a slider is simply not granular enough alone.

And regarding the "Opinion" status, it would seem that one could make a case for 99.5% of all design considerations as "Opinion".

Yes it's an opinion, but one offered up from the side of the coin that actually tries to create work in Inkscape. I'm quite certain that had the user base been significantly larger and composed primarily of folks that leverage certain tools and workflow styles, that this would be a much larger issue.