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issue158:inkscape

Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !


Last time we began looking at the new features in Inkscape 1.0, and I suggested that you could install the snap version of the package in order to let it live alongside the deb package version of 0.92.x you may be currently using. It turns out that this was both good advice and bad.

The reason it’s a good option is because, as I feared, version 1.0 is proving to contain a number of bugs and regressions that range from slightly annoying to full-scale showstoppers, depending on what you use Inkscape for. In that respect, the ability to still switch back to 0.92 makes using the snap a definite advantage.

The bad news, however, is that there are some packaging issues with the snap which result in incorrect and missing icons. I noted this problem last month, with regard to some symbolic icons appearing in the toolbar when using a non-symbolic icon theme. Since then, however, I’ve noticed (and reported) several icons that are completely missing from key parts of the UI. For example, here’s the Layers dialog – something that you’re likely to use very frequently – missing the icons for adding and deleting layers, and those for moving a layer to the top or bottom of the stack:

These same icons are used (and therefore absent) in various other parts of the user interface, and there are other missing icons too. Fortunately, the buttons still operate as they should, and the tooltips work, so you can still drive the software. Familiarity with older versions helps, but if you’re new to Inkscape then the 1.0 snap, as it currently stands, may well lead to confusion.

You might think that switching to a different icon theme would help, but all you get is a different ‘missing image’ icon. Switch to the symbolic icons, however, and they are all present – which at least offers something of a workaround for now, if you don’t mind that aesthetic.

There is another option: there’s a PPA available for the 1.0 release which does not suffer from this problem (https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/+archive/ubuntu/stable). By installing this, however, you’ll replace the deb packaged 0.92.x version if you have that installed. This is the approach I’ll be taking for the immediate future, so that I can produce screenshots for this series that use the same icons as those in earlier instalments – however I will be running it in a virtual machine, as I’ll be sticking with 0.92 to produce my comic strips until the 1.x series matures a little.

There’s more to say about the UI changes in Inkscape 1.0, but, right now, you’re probably itching to see what new features there are to help you when actually drawing something.

Let’s start with changes to the canvas – the entire drawing area within the Inkscape window – beginning with rotation.

Particularly when drawing freehand, it’s useful to be able to rotate the canvas to better suit the range of motion in your arm. Think about using a graphics tablet: it’s a lot easier to move the stylus from left to right rather than up and down. Of course this doesn’t mean strictly horizontal lines, since your arm traces out an arc. But the general principle remains, which can result in artists trying to perform gymnastics to rotate their tablets – and their heads – in order to improve their accuracy for awkwardly angled lines.

With 1.0, it’s now possible to rotate the canvas itself, so you can keep the tablet, and your body, in a more comfortable position. If you’re using a mouse with a wheel, then you can hold Ctrl and Shift while rotating the wheel. Alternatively, hold Ctrl while you click-and-drag with the middle mouse button (which may also be the wheel). The latter is especially useful for tablet users, for whom the middle mouse button is often duplicated as a button on the body of the stylus.

Some users have reported that they find it too easy to accidentally trigger rotation when they actually intended to pan the canvas. Although there’s no way to disable rotation completely in this release, it is possible to assign a keyboard shortcut to reset the rotation quickly if you accidentally trigger it. Within the keyboard shortcuts pane of the Inkscape Preferences dialog you can also set shortcuts to rotate the canvas clockwise and counter-clockwise, though none of these functions have default shortcuts assigned.

If you do rotate the canvas, and haven’t assigned a keyboard shortcut for resetting it, you still have a couple of options available for returning to the normal orientation. The obvious option is simply to rotate in the opposite direction but this approach may prove difficult to do precisely. Better is to use a new option in the View menu: View > Canvas Orientation > Reset Rotation.

If you want to precisely set the rotation amount, there’s an additional field at the right of the status bar, alongside the previous one for the zoom value. You can, of course, type a value into this field directly. But you can also scroll the mouse wheel over the numbers to change the values in 1° increments – or click the +/- buttons to do the same.

In common with most input boxes in the Inkscape UI, there’s a context menu that you can access with a right-click on the field, offering a few standard values, this time in 45° increments. This is another useful way to reset the rotation back to zero.

It’s all very well being able to rotate the canvas to whatever amount you want, but what does that actually get you as an artist? Unfortunately, the answer is ‘not much’. As I mentioned at the outset, this is particularly useful for freehand work, using the Bezier, pencil or calligraphy tools. But if you want to use Inkscape’s other features, it has a lot less to offer.

I would have thought that the point of being able to rotate the canvas is that it gives you a way to set an angled baseline against which to create other objects. If you need to create a few lines of text, perfectly positioned at an angle of 26.35° then you would surely just punch that value into the field at the right of the status bar, then plough on with the text tool. Except it doesn’t work like that.

Rotating the canvas just rotates your view of the canvas. Text, rectangles and even guides are still oriented to the page, not to the new view. Here’s my rotated canvas with a rectangle drawn, and a pair of guides dragged out after it had already been rotated:

It gets even odder when you select objects. The handles for the selection box maintain their “normal” orientation – so the scale handle for the top-right of the box still points diagonally from SW to NE, for example. But with my page rotated somewhere near 45°, it results in arrows that are distinctly misleading, both in resize mode and rotate/skew mode:

What would happen if you dragged the vertical arrows in the first example? You might think it would scale the content vertically as you look at it. But instead it scales the objects vertically along the axis of the page, not the axis of the screen.

Canvas rotation feels like a missed opportunity to me. Making the other tools, and guides, operate relative to the screen, not the page, would result in some very powerful workflows. Instead it’s a helpful feature for freehand drawing, but not a lot else.

Another new feature that’s closely related to canvas rotation is the ability to flip the canvas vertically and horizontally – not to be confused with flipping individual objects via the toolbar buttons or the H and V keys. The canvas flipping options can be accessed from the View > Canvas Orientation menu, or you can add keyboard shortcuts for them from the Inkscape Preferences dialog (none are assigned by default). They behave pretty much as you would expect, flipping the canvas view either left-to-right, top-to-bottom, or both (which is equivalent to rotating through 180°). Note that the drop shadow on the nominal bottom-right page border will give you an indication of the current state (if you have it visible, of course).

Flipping the canvas is a technique often used by digital artists to get a different view of their work. Sometimes issues in layout or perspective are more obvious in one orientation or another. Simply by making text less legible it can help to expose general design problems without those pesky words vying for your brain’s attention at the same time.

Resetting a flipped canvas is done by flipping it a second time in whichever direction(s) are required. Unless you’ve set keyboard shortcuts, this potentially means two trips to a nested sub-menu. I’d prefer to see the “Reset rotation” menu entry replaced with a more general “Reset view” option that would not only set the rotation back to zero, but also turn off any horizontal or vertical flipping.

You may be wondering what happens if you apply both canvas rotation and flipping at the same time? The answer is that the rotation is applied first, then the whole viewport is flipped. This is arguably the better ordering for these transformations, as the display switches between two clearly distinct orientations – probably more useful for spotting design problems. For comparison, here’s my test page, first rotated and then rotated and flipped horizontally (next page).

One problem that affects all Inkscape users at some time, and novices in particular, is losing your place in a drawing. You’ve zoomed in, then panned a little too far, and suddenly you’re looking at a plain white section of the window with no idea which direction you need to go in to return to your work. With the addition of flipping and rotating, there’s even more likelihood that you may get lost in your own drawing at some time.

Historically you could deal with this situation by zooming out until the canvas was visible in the window, then zooming back in. Or you could use the zoom shortcuts – such as zoom to page – to get back to a known state. But these approaches change your zoom level, which causes Inkscape to re-render the content, causing a real slowdown on some drawings.

A new addition to the zoom buttons in the toolbar for 1.0 is “Center page in window”. Clicking this, or using the keyboard shortcut (default: Ctrl-4), pans the content of the Inkscape window in order to position the center of the page at the center of the window, without changing the zoom level. This works based on the nominal page size set in the document properties, regardless of whether or not the page border is visible.

Hopefully you’ll find at least one of these new features will be helpful to you. But that’s not all for the new canvas and view features in 1.0, so next month we’ll continue to look at a few other changes and additions in this area.

issue158/inkscape.1593605292.txt.gz · Dernière modification : 2020/07/01 14:08 de auntiee