Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
This month we’re continuing to look at the changes to dialogs in Inkscape version 1.3. It’s almost become a cliché to see substantial changes to the Live Path Effects dialog with each significant Inkscape release, but here we are again with yet another round of UI updates. As a reminder, in version 1.2 the main LPE dialog looked like this (once a couple of effects had been added): Clicking the ‘+’ button would open a large dialog from which you could select the LPE to add, as well as search, view the entries as a list, or as a more/less compact grid, set LPEs as favorites (and filter to show only those), and toggle the visibility of experimental effects. In fact there’s so much functionality baked into this UI that I expected it to hang around for years to come. How wrong I was. Fast forward to version 1.3. The main LPE dialog no longer shows a list of the applied effects, with a single panel of settings for the currently selected one. Instead, the configuration panels are shown directly, in an ‘accordion’ UI pattern, such that by expanding one panel, all the others will collapse. You can collapse the current panel, too, if you just want to see a shorter list of effects, which makes it easier to reorder them by dragging the handle at the top-right of each panel.
With this UI, there’s no longer a ‘+’ button, and no longer a large dialog that opens. Instead you have two options for selecting the new LPE to add: • Type something into the search box to be presented with an alphabetically ordered list of LPEs that match the search term. (Hint: if you just want to see a list of all of them, putting a single space in this field seems to do the trick). • Click the drop-down button next to the search field to be presented with a pop-up that contains a categorised grid of effects. There’s no way to change the size or shape of this pop-up, nor the spacing between items, so I’m not sure how well it will work on small screens – especially if you enable the experimental LPEs. Speaking of which, the option for that is now hidden away in the preferences dialog: Edit > Preferences > Behaviour > Live Path Effects (LPE). Enabling the ‘Show experimental effects’ checkbox in there will add an extra section to the bottom of the pop-up. In that same settings panel, you’ll find an option to ‘Show deprecated LPE gallery’ (i.e. the older UI), if you really don’t like the new design. Personally I advise against switching back, as this option – and the whole gallery dialog – will certainly be removed in a later release. You may as well get used to the new approach now, and hope that this one finally sticks around for a while.
I think hiding the option for showing the experimental LPEs was a good move. This isn’t something that should be temptingly presented to novice users every time they add an effect. The experimental LPEs are marked as such for good reason. They should only be used with full knowledge of the potential problems – not only in terms of Inkscape’s stability, but also considering possible issues loading any files that use them in future releases. Any LPEs that are set as favorites, appear in a section at the top of the pop-up. Unfortunately they no longer appear in their categorised sections, and the Favorites section is shown in alphabetical order, so any sense of grouping is lost for these. You can either have an LPE categorised or flagged as a favorite, not both. The list view that drops down when you use the search field is purely alphabetical, not only lacking the categories, but also lacking any indication of which effects have been set as favorites. It would be nice to see favorites displayed with a small star or other badge, and I’d rather see the list view also grouped in the same way as the icon pop-up, for consistency.
Without the gallery view, there’s a question of how you set (or unset) the favorite flag on an effect. There’s no context menu available in the pop-up – right-clicking on an LPE will behave the same as a left-click, and add it to the list of applied effects in the main body of the dialog. Instead, you have to add the effect to a path (perhaps a temporary, sacrificial one), then use the new pop-up menu in the effect’s controls pane to toggle the favorite flag. On my system, there’s some oddness with the outline style for this pop-up’s button, but it still behaves correctly. In this screenshot you can see that there’s a group of three buttons which are visible whether the pane is collapsed or open: the first button toggles the visibility of the LPE, the second deletes it from the list, and the third opens the pop-up menu. The pop-up contains a few useful options for working with effects:
‘Duplicate’ is pretty self-explanatory, but note that the duplicated effect will appear directly below the original, and you may need to move it up or down in the list by hand. This can be done by dragging with the handle at the right, as previously mentioned, or you can use the ‘Move up’ and ‘Move down’ entries in this menu. Only valid options are presented, so you won’t see ‘Move down’ in the menu for the last LPE in the list, for example (as in this screenshot). ‘Flatten’ is an interesting new addition. It’s always been possible to ‘fix’ the output of an LPE chain by selecting the Path > Object to Path menu option. This changes the drawing such that the original path is replaced by the result of the entire LPE chain. The Flatten option does something similar, but it stops at the effect on which the option is selected, fixing all the effects up to and including that one, but leaving subsequent parts still as editable LPEs. If you use this on the last effect in the chain, it’s the same as using Object to Path, but this could be very useful where you’re sure that the first few effects in a chain are correct and won’t need to be modified, but still want to leave yourself with the flexibility of fully editable effects for the rest of the chain.
‘Set custom defaults’ will use a snapshot of the current settings as the default values for this particular effect in future. If there’s already a snapshot set, this changes to ‘Forget custom defaults’. Finally we have the ‘Set favorite’ option (shown with the British English spelling of ‘favourite’ in this screenshot, as I’m based in the UK). If this LPE is already set as a favorite then, as you’ve likely guessed, this will display ‘Unset favorite’ instead. It’s a little unfortunate that the only way to change favorites is to first add the effect to a path, perhaps only to throw it away again afterwards. But changing favorites is likely to be a rare enough occurrence that this additional step probably won’t cause any real problems for most users. I’m going to take a very quick look at a second dialog this month: the Symbols dialog (Object > Symbols). This has seen a bit of UI polish with 1.3, with the confusing array of buttons for adjusting the layout now rationalised into a simple pop-up menu. My tip here is to leave ‘Zoom to fit’ enabled and just tweak the ‘Tile size’ slider to adjust the size of the symbols in the dialog, which seems to work well with the predefined symbols, at least.
On that point, version 1.3 ships with a vastly increased number of symbols (596 of them, to be precise), through the addition of the ‘SJJB map icons’ set. Of course, more symbols are always welcome – if they’re high enough quality – so it would be nice to see some Open Source icon sets, of the sort often used in web pages, make their way into future releases. The plus and minus buttons in the bottom-left replace the similarly-placed buttons from previous versions, which were always somewhat confusing due to less-than-obvious icon designs. These buttons only become active when the ‘Current document’ set is selected in the dialog’s drop-down list. Their tooltips have been reworded to make their purpose far more understandable now: “Convert selected object(s) to symbol” – this will create a symbol from the currently selected objects, replacing those objects with the symbol, in-place. This may be useful if you need to use the same icon or other design repeatedly within your document, though I’d usually just stick with clones myself.
“Convert selected symbol to object, and all symbols of this type to clones of this object” – this one is perhaps more useful, allowing you to select a symbol in the dialog and have the first instance of it on the page converted to a real, editable object. Any further instances will be converted to clones of the object. I can see this coming in handy when one of the predefined symbols is close to your requirements, but needs a little tweaking. Of course these can be used in series to first convert an existing symbol to an editable object; then edit it on-canvas; then convert the edited version back to a document-specific symbol. Finally I’ll squeeze in one more UI addition – though a pop-up rather than a dialog. At the top-right of the canvas, Inkscape has always had a rarely used button to toggle its behaviour when the window size is changed. The default is to not do anything much, other than to show or hide the relevant parts of the canvas to suit the new window size. In other words, the document is not zoomed in any way. The other mode will scale the document to suit the new window size, which may suit some users who always want to see the same amount of content, regardless of the window size. This feels to me like a feature that novice users might think they want before they discover the myriad ways to zoom and pan in Inkscape, and realise they’d rather control the zoom themselves than have it automatically change when they resize the window.
This button has now been replaced with a pop-up that still contains the previous functionality via an option at the bottom, but which also exposes radio buttons and toggles for the many display modes Inkscape now has. Note, however, that the ‘Quick zoom’ and ‘Quick preview’ entries can’t be clicked – they’re just there to remind you of the keyboard shortcuts. These both work as long as the key is held down – though you can also trick them into operating as on/off toggles by focusing another window, or right-clicking to bring up the context menu, while holding the key. In that case the ‘temporary’ view will remain on releasing the key, and a quick jab of it subsequently will return you to the previous state. I’ve covered ‘Quick zoom’ before – it zooms the display just enough so that the selected object(s) fill the available space. ‘Quick preview’ is a new addition with 1.3, and temporarily hides grids, guidelines, selection boxes, and so on. It also clips the visible display of objects to the page boundary. Essentially it is intended to give you a rapid preview of how your document might look when printed or exported, without all the Inkscape-specific parts that won’t make it to the final document.