On Wednesday 05 September 2007 18:49:52 Jody Garnett wrote: > Idea One - stick with the current program > > Gabriel that is similar to how things are supposed to work; each tool > falls into a a category, and each tool has a different icon. If you made > a category for "line" and assigned it to the keyboard short cut "l" you > would be able to toggle between all the available line tools. hmmmm... not sure I got it completely right... if I'm understanding correctly, to be able of having modes (snap to vertext, snap to line, parallel to segment, orthogonal to segment, ortogonal to viewport axes, arc, spline, bezier, etc) it would mean a new tool button on the line category (drop down button) both for lines and polygons (as I need to set a temporary mode to polygon editting too). And as things are right now, wouldn't that imply once I need to change mode (say I was drawing curves and now need to switch to straight lines with snapping on), that would finish the current shape and start a new one?...
> > I wanted to see if this approach would work out? what do you think? I need to be up to what uDig defines as the standard interaction mechanisms, as I don't want to get up with something inconsistent with the rest. That said, the need seems to be to be able of using different modes while creating a single geometry, yet keeping the interactions to a minimum comprehensible set, which is where context sensitivity fits. What I've thought so far is to have a single "create line" tool and a single "create polygon" tool that when selected enables a "modes" toolbar, where each mode of course could be tied to a keyboard shortcut for easy of use. Which seems to be what Inkscape does too. See next message in response to Adrian's one to get an insight of what I could came up with so far. > > Idea Two - sensible defaults (ie context sensitive) combined with > keyboard modifers > > The other thing to do is look at how InkScape and Viso handle keyboard > modifiers and see if we can come up with something consistent, and then > start to make your tools stupidly context sensitive. > 1. Shift is used to constrain *any* tool to horizontal motion or > vertical motion > 2. Alt click is used to indicate "context" - start by "alt clicking" a > reference layer in the layer view - to make it "friendly" the default > the reference layer is the current layer etc...) > 3. Alt click to select a "reference" line segment on the reference layer > (you can tell you need a line segment because you are using the line tool) > 4. Now when shift is pressed *any* tool is constrained with respect to > the reference line I think it could work if we keep minimal, but would fail as long as we need more than one constrainment "modes"? i.e. what being constrained to the reference line means? can draw only parallels? orthogonals? tangents? (say its a curve :) crossings? > > If you wanted you could use a map graphic grid as reference layer to a > visible way to get horz / vertical constraints... yup, makes sense. Yet I think this mode of operation could be more cluttering and more restrictive than being able to allow a mode to take full control of the interactions if needed, or just adding a behaviour to the tool's default ones... but nothing is sealed yet luckily. Gabriel > > Sigh - it will be nice to work on uDig again :-) > Jody > > Gabriel Roldán wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > I've being talking with Jesse about a problem I need to face and would > > love any more feedback. Bellow is the chat log, > > but lets first resume the problem. > > > > As part of our current editting tools and spatial operations project, I > > need a way to create line segments parallel to a > > segment from another feature, whether it is a line or polygon feature, > > from the same layer or not. > > One option is to create a new tool, but it has many disadvantages: > > - having a different tool for each extra behaviour adds too much clutter > > - it does not allow to create a parallel segment when needed and keep > > adding vertexes freely for the same geometry > > > > A possible approach would be for edit toold to have "modes" of operation, > > where they set up the default behaviours, but plugins may > > contribute/replace them. > > Think of it as an extra toolbar enabled when the create line/polygon tool > > is selected, allowing to temporally select a mode for a tool, like ortho > > lines, snap mode, parallel, arc, etc. They get enabled and disabled on > > user's demand. > > _______________________________________________ > User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig) > http://udig.refractions.net > http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel _______________________________________________ User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig) http://udig.refractions.net http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel
