Re: Patch for layers panel

[Bernhard Herzog]

Ralf Engels <address@hidden> writes:

> Ok, seems like there are some errors still in. You are right, dragging can 
> not 
> work.

Would be nice if it did work, though :)

> Yes. It seems like I have to learn about these doc-strings. By the way, is 
> there a way to generate documentation like in java?

There's HappyDoc (http://happydoc.sourceforge.net/) 
I haven't used it much, but a student currently working a bit on Thuban
(http://thuban.intevation.org/) found it useful.


> >  - Do we really need the PreviewColorFactory in its current form? 
[...]
> 
> Don't know. I just wanted to get it running. If you have a better idea, feel 
> free to change it.

OK.


> YES!. I want GTK for another cause. To get stock-menu items with pictures.
> Here a little patch for setup. Other changes have to be made in 
> Modules/Setup.in.
> This is how far I managed to get this. There seems to be some issues in the 
> Modules.

The patch I posted a link to a few days ago has a simular fix to
setup.py plus hopefully all of the changes needed for the C code and the
most important parts of the Sketch/UI code.

> I don't know how easy it is to manage the layers by the tree view.
> I have played around with a project called GILT (see my homepage).

Which one of them? I had actually tried the GTK/OpenGL based one at one
point :).

> It had a 
> tree view for all object. 
> This did not work as well as I thought it should. The problem is that drawing 
> is two dimensional. 
> Any type of list-representation is only one dimensional and thus does not 
> match. It confuses a lot.

The real structure of the document is not purely two-dimensional,
though. It's a nested hierarchy of objects. The normal WYSIWYG diplay
only shows a projection of this. 

A tree-view is a pretty good way to illustrate the vertical structure of
the drawing IMO. What's not obvious enough perhaps is the connection
between an item in the tree and the object in the WYSIWYG window.

> Maybe it could be better to show object relations on the drawing area with 
> colored lines.

Apart from nesting there aren't really any special relations among
objects in Sketch. Even blend- and mask-groups are just groups from a
certain perspective although some of their children are treated
specially.

How would you indicate nesting in the drawing area?

> > How are going to handle this? As you probably have seen the active layer
> > is still managed by the document object while it should really be
> > maintained by the editor.
> 
> No real clue.
> I wanted the following mechanism:
> If at least one object is selected, the layer is selected in the layer panel 
> as well.
> If you select another layer, the selected object are moved to this layer.

This might be too different from the way it works in 0.6, though.
Especially the latter.

> This is how it works in Freehand.

Interesting. I've only briefly played around with a demo version of that
a few years ago. Didn't notice that.

What the active layer in Sketch is mostly used for is to determine on
which layer to place newly drawn objects. How does Freehand determine
that?

   Bernhard

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