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http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4499
------- Additional comments from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun Mar 16 23:55:24 +0000
2008 -------
One thing that seems to have been missed in all this is that images in Draw
fundamentally do have a size and it is measured in cm or inches as shown on the
ruler that surrounds the image. All we are asking for is the ability to select
how many pixels per unit length are saved into the raster image on export.
Now, I quite like nmailhot's suggestions here as I think they encompass a few
different use cases that I have personally seen and they don't seem to be well
enunciated here yet:
(1) A user has drawn a diagram in Draw. A publisher specifies that the diagram
must be 8.25cm wide so the drawing is this size. The publisher then says that
they would really rather a TIFF than any other form of diagram so please provide
the diagram "at 300dpi" meaning 974px wide. (discoleo: I'm not making this up...
you may have more experience of preprint stuff than others here, but these are
instructions to authors from publishers)
(2) The user then wants to put this same diagram on their web page. They know
that the rest of their graphics and their web page layout are set up for 400px
wide so they then want to export a graphic at that size.
Please note that I have been able to talk about these things without mentioning
loaded terms such as resolution or dpi. As a user, I truly don't care about
whether you call them lpi dpi ppi or anything else you may care to mention. In
fact, I'd probably prefer that you scrapped all of those terms and gave me the
option to specify how the export was performed in pixel/inch, pixel/cm and
perhaps throw in some others that might be useful such as pixel/mm and pixel/pt.
(since the "experts" apparently can't agree on what terms like dpi means and
some "experts" here are arguing that the rest of the world's current usage is
wrong and that they are right...)
Thinking through the different suggestions that have been offered here, I have
tried to distil what, in my mind at least, is the difference between the ideas
that I like and those that I dislike. One thing that jumped out at me was that
discoleo's mockup and suggestions are heavily influenced by what he declares to
be his workflow:
> In general, when I (or a user) create a work, I will have to
> decide beforehand, what is the purpose of this work:
> A.) Display it on screen
> B.) Print it
This workflow is the opposite of what normally happens in my experience. You end
up using the same graphic or perhaps a derived graphic in both print and on
screen and you need to be able to export an image from Draw at any stage.
Throwing words around like "pragmatic" and telling us that users need to be
protected from themselves doesn't help here. Providing a user interface that is
sufficiently flexible to fit the user's preferred workflow does help.
I'm almost feeling that the more discoleo argues about this bug, the more he is
arguing against this feature even been useful, which to me means that he doesn't
understand the use cases for it. In particular, the insistence on using
"pragmatic" pixel/inch values is problematic as it makes use case 2 impossible
to fulfil.
On the other hand, the interface suggested by nmailhot allows the user to choose
how the export should be performed in a variety of different ways. The user can
choose either the size in pixels or the pixels/cm (or inch etc) which gives us
the ability to pass use cases 1 and 2 that I have highlighted. However, I would
suggest that the "screen" vs "print" resolution could be collapsed into just one
dropdown to make the interface simpler. Additionally, the ability to export at
different page sizes seems orthogonal to the raster export and instead a feature
that should be on a vector export dialogue box.
Final comments -- nmailhot suggested this little gem in the export interface:
( ) Selected (o) Visible area ( ) Whole page
YES PLEASE!! That would be fantastic. I spend too much time resizing the page
down to the graphic size (often by trial and error) so that I can export to PDF
only the image and not the surrounding whitespace. (These PDFs are usually fed
into pdflatex as graphics).
Also, just to pick nits... discoleo wrote "However, pixels have NO dimension."
That is true up to the point where a "resolution" header is inserted in the
image and is quite common in many raster image formats. I struggle to see how
this comment (along with much of discoleo's lecture series on printers and dots)
has anything to do with how to allow the user to change the number of pixels
exported by Draw.
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