Hi,

I've just sent in two gimp ui brainstorm pictures for angled guides to that gimp brainstorm blog, where casual comments are discouraged, so I thought I'd summarize here:

1. Angled Linear Guides Double click on a line defines a center of rotation. Drag anywhere else on the line, and the guide rotates around that point. Pressing shift, control, or shift+control can change the precision of the rotation. Double click also undefines the center, or redefines it.

When there is no center defined, plain dragging will move the line. Dragging with shift, control, or shift+control, will still rotate the line, but rotates it around where the button was clicked down at. The amount of rotation in this case could be, for instance, based on moving horizontally back and forth, or perhaps have the rotation center be arbitrarily assigned to be a little ways away from the click point (but still on screen).

2. Guides based on any path This would make precisely aligned touch-ups easy, especially with tablet pressure effects when painting, when "Stroke path" just doesn't cut it. Double clicking could enter and exit a path editing mode.
Think Inkscape engraving tool for potential expansions of this sort of thing.

So anyway,
Tom
------------
http://www.tomlechner.com
http://www.laidout.org

On 11/10/2007 08:01:39 AM, Sven Neumann wrote:

On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 21:04 -0800, Tom Lechner wrote:

1. Angled Linear Guides
Double click on a line defines a center of rotation.

Double-clicking doesn't work for this. Apart from the fact that we don't use double-click at all in the GIMP user interface, it is also extremely difficult to define a position precisely this way.

If we really need angled guides, then there's needs to be a way move the center of rotation precisely.

I don't understand the double click prohibition. Seeing as how the mouse barely moves during a double click, how is that less precise than a single click? Anyway, if you are one pixel off, you can still move the thing. If double click is out of the question, then have control- click define the center point.

When moving a normal guide, it says something like "Move Guide: 34". Angled guides would need position and angle. When the angle is not a multiple of 90 degrees, the status bar would simply say something like "Guide: angle: 23.5, position: 100,50". The position could be listed as a point on the x or y axis, or it would be the center point. That seems precise to me.

2. Guides based on any path

There's "Snap to Active Path" already, so what extra functionality would guides add?

Well, I learn something new every day! The only thing added would be a slightly easier way to get to editing that path from the move tool. Currently, unless I'm missing something simple again, you must select the path tool, then click down on the path, assuming you can find it, then edit it. If a path is used as a guide, then it might be helpful to have that graphically indicated in a style similar to current guides: dashed and colored.

I still think this could be expanded to provide progressive path guides to provide something like Inkscape's engravers tool. This would mean not just snapping the center of a tool to the line, but also optionally the edge of the outline of a brush, then using the line just drawn as the snap guide for a new line. Using permanent paths a la "Snap to active path" would not be very useful in this case, as it would clutter up your list of real paths with temporary ones.

Actually I think that "Snap to Active Path" is good enough for everything that you would use angled guides for. It basically makes angled guides superfluous.

Perhaps! But less convenient in some cases.

Tom --------------
http://www.tomlechner.com
http://www.laidout.org