10-17-2020, 04:58 AM (This post was last modified: 10-17-2020, 05:03 AM by Zubersoft.)
I'm still seeing reports of memory leaks with freeform annotations, so I need to resolve that, as it could be related to the black pages. I have fixes for several of the things you mentioned Cmart, but I'll have to look at the blank checkbox, the radial menu issue, and the annotations going bananas, although I'm not sure how to cause that one yet.
BRX - I'll modify the logic so that right-clicking switches to the selection mode and then it will try to select whatever you click on. This means you'll still need to switch back to whatever tool you were using before after making edits. I can add keyboard shortcuts to switch between the tools if that would help. So you could do something like Alt + S to switch to the selection mode, alt + p for pen, or something along those lines. Or maybe just typing 'S' when not entering text for a text annotation could do that. I'm open to suggestions for how to make it easier with a mouse. I don't like the idea of trying to edit/update a stamp annotation by clicking on it while the stamp tool is active, because that doesn't really work with any of the current design in the sense that editing is only allowed while the selection tool is active, and I don't want to try to muck with that logic.
10-17-2020, 09:28 AM (This post was last modified: 10-17-2020, 09:29 AM by MartinH.)
I've updated recently and did another round of testing. Overall it's very stable, and I've had no crashes. But I did find more issues:
The pen is quite fast and and precise, but when I zoom in, it becomes very noticeable that it only draws additional points in the line after moving a certain distance, making it impossible to accurately draw any fine shapes. My use case is trying to write text on the page at about the same size as the printed lyrics , and the resulting text looks very poor. Maybe this threshold could become smaller related to the zoom amount.
I mentioned earlier a problem where the opacity of the highlighter tool doesn't seem to stick. I can set a new opacity, and when I start drawing, it seems to be correct, but when I move the stylus away, the line changes to the previous opacity. I still have this problem.
I think this might have already been decided, but I also find it odd that a diminuendo starts some distance to the left of where I start drawing. I think the starting point should be the left side of the shape.
When placing circles, touching the screen places the center, then you drag to make it bigger. But the circle only grows when dragging right/left, not up down. Not a big deal, but a bit surprising when it happens.
Right-click stylus button doesn't have the option to choose the select tool. Maybe this isn't feasbile, since you might have to switch to another tool after selecting something. But if you're looking for more efficient ways to implement selection, maybe this could be used. Though I would still rather have an undo action on my right-click button (even if it means holding the button and tapping to undo).
When using the tap delete tool, a highlight appears around objects as you delete them. The size of this highlight is inconsistent depending on the annotation being deleted and the size. Even stranger, it seems to grow over time, and after a few minutes I got it as large as about half of the entire page. This affects most tools, but not arrows or hairpins.
I find the changing icon for the Shapes tool, depending on what is selected, a bit confusing. It seems to be the only icon that changes depending on which tool is selected, even though you could maybe do the same for the eraser and stamps.
As a feature request, I would like to be able to change the size of my arrow heads. They get bigger with line thickness, but even the smallest head is too big for some places I would like to place arrows.
Overall though, it's working pretty well, and there was a lot of stuff fixed. Great work!
If I add select as an option for the stylus button action, it won't reset back to the previous tool after you've selected something (otherwise it would just deselect what you selected). Is that what you would like? If you right click to select
something, it then stays in selection mode, and you have to switch back to the previous tool once you are done? I'm fine with adding support for that if that behavior is acceptable.
I've seen that highlight eraser issue before, and it happened because I didn't reset the highlight size correctly in between highlighting different annotations. I can't seem to reproduce it though. Can you focus in on one kind of annotation and let me know which one is responsible for making it grow? I'll try to test for it on my end as well. So far I didn't see it with new freeform, highlight, stamp, crescendo or decrescendo annotations.
I'll look at the circle issue.
The shapes icon lets you know which active shape is going to be applied when you draw. With the stamp tool, it already shows you what stamp is selected at the top level, so I'm not sure what you would want changed there. With the eraser, the other eraser modes don't really indicate that it is tied to erasing, so I think that would be more confusing than using the eraser icon for the tool, as that is what the tool is doing. The way the eraser behaves doesn't warrant changing the icon in my opinion, but I'm open to hearing more opinions.
As far as resizable arrow heads, the logic for drawing the arrow is very complex and involves a lot of geometric calculations to define the border of the shape to be filled. As part of that, I determine the length of the lines from the tip of the arrow based on the length of the arrow to be drawn with a maximize size based on the thickness of the arrow. I'm not really sure how to make this configurable in a meaningful way. When you say you want the arrow head smaller, what exactly does that mean? Do you want the lines draw from the tip of the arrow to be shorter? Do you want the thickness of those lines smaller than the thickess of the main part of the arrow? Are you really looking for a different kind of arrowhead, such as a simple filled one? Consider these from the unicode set: https://unicode-table.com/en/sets/arrow-symbols/
Which one of those matches what you are looking for? Defining different options for how the arrow is drawn is something I can do, but it's not going to be something I'm going to do for the initial update. That would be something I would implement in the future, as this update is already far overdue, and I think that makes more sense as a feature enhancement after other higher priority stuff is addressed. You could always add an SVG file as a stamp for small arrows, or a bitmap of a small arrow if that works better for you.
I'm fixing a few more things, and I'll be pushing out another build that resolves the memory leak issues, issues with erasing, adds support for resizing stamps using selection circles to drag, and fixes for other reported crashes.
The smoothest way I can think to implement the select feature with the stylus button would be enter Select mode when you right-button tap on an annotation, and as stay in Select mode while the user is interacting with the selection (resizing, cut, copy, etc). Then click/tap anywhere else to resume the previous tool. If he wants to select something else, he would right-button tap again, so there's no need to stay in selection mode.
I've tried reproducing the eraser highlight growing, but now I can't get it to happen. I'll try later and let you know if I can get it to happen again.
Regarding the changing shapes icon, I can't think of any better ideas. It's useful to show which shape is active, but it's hard to discover that there are more shapes than just the default (square) one. But I don't know what you mean that stamp tool shows you what is selected. I see it in the wheel, but the icon on the top bar just shows the generic stamp icon, not the selected stamp.
For the arrows, it could definitely get silly to try to include every option and style of arrowheads (I've gotten lost in the settings for arrows in Inkscape). I think they work very well, and I appreciate the sophistication you put into them. For me, just being able to tweak the length of the lines coming from the tip of the leader would be good. Though I can see value in still keeping the relation to line width and leader length, so maybe just expose a scaling factor that multiplies the existing calculated length.
Crazy idea: You could even combine the line and arrow tools, and just have a arrowhead length setting that can go to 0.
Another idea relating to the hairpins: Why not allow them to be dragged either left-to-right or right-to-left? Most people (including me) would probably use them left to right, but it could be confusing if you try to drag backwards and nothing happens. Of course the starting location is currently on one side of the starting symbol, which is a bit odd if you drag backwards. Instead, it could appear centered on the location where you start dragging, and follow the midpoint of the dragged line until it reaches the minimum size where it starts growing. Another bonus is that this way if you place a minimum length hairpin by just tapping once, it's placed centred on the tap location, which is more intuitive than placing it to the right of the cursor.
Some new bugs:
- When entering edit mode, I can pan using a finger, or the stylus when in Pan mdoe. But after I change the zoom using two-finger pinch zoom, panning (with finger or Pan tool) doesn't work anymore.
- When zoomed out completely, I can pan the screen up about half a page height, but not down. I'm not sure which of those is correct, but it's odd that it's different depending on direction.
- I can't seem to find any way to zoom, besides pinch. What do you do if it's not a touch screen?
I agree that what you have described would be the smoothest workflow with using the stylus button to select, but it involves having to insert a lot of code that is likely to introduce bugs because it changes a lot of the touch processing code to know when to ignore what the user is doing due to the current state of things. There are all sorts of new situations that would have to be handled correctly:
1) If the user uses the stylus side button to select, draws a selection box, but there is nothing in the selection box, then I have to revert back to the previous tool immediately
2) If the user does select something, then I have to modify all of the code that would normally reset the tool when the stylus is released after using the side stylus button
3) If the user has selected annotations, but then changes the selection state through the layer dialog, for example, I have to ensure that if they clear the selection state, that I reset the tool back to what they were using before
4) If the user switches tools manually using the toolbar after having used the side stylus button to select something, but doesn't tap somewhere else to clear the selection which would then reset the tool, I have to reset the state back to normal so that the next time the user touches down on the page, it's going to process it normally
5) The normal code that is used to process a selection has to be ignored in the case that the user has tapped away after selecting annotations with the side stylus button, which means having to add code to not only ignore the touch down event, but also the move event, the pointer released event, any manipulation events that might be generated etc. This has to be handled in different ways for Windows and Android, as they have very different ways of processing touch interactions, which is likely to introduce bugs
That's a lot of work compared to me just inserting code to switch to the selection tool if the right stylus button is selected, but not reset back to the previous tool after they release. It's more tedious for the user, but right now, I'm going to have to start setting limits on what is going to be changed so that I get the update released sooner. Given that you can only tie one action to the side stylus button, I'm thinking that supporting gestures for swapping between selection and the previous tool is still going to be useful to users.
I didn't realize you were referring to the toolbar. The reason I do not change that icon is there is no text to accompany it like in the radial menu, and users get trained to look for specific text or images. If the stamp image is always changing at the top, this might throw some users off when they are quickly scanning to select the stamp tool. If the majority of people would prefer that I show the active stamp in the toolbar instead, that is not difficult for me to do.
I'll make a note to add a setting for controlling the arrow head length. Perhaps I'll configure this as a scaling factor that defaults to 1.0, and accepts values between 0.25 and 2 (I think anything outside that might start to look pretty ridiculous).
While combining the tools is a creative idea, it would be unintuitive to people I think, and would also be less performant, as drawing an arrow requires far more resources than drawing a line. This is probably not a huge deal though, unless users were drawing an extremely large number of arrows or lines.
While I certainly could combine the two, it would make quick placement of minimum size decrescendos more tedious, as you could no longer just tap. You'd have to tap, and then perform a small slide to the left to get it to flip, but not too much where it starts growing beyond the minimum size. Or are you suggesting I still leave both tools present, but allow them to be flipped if you drag it past the starting point? As far as centering it, while I agree that might make it easier to place the minimum size crescendo/decrescendo, it then makes it harder to position one that you want to increase in size. I just tried it out, and it feels more natural knowing that where I press down is the start of the crescendo, and then I drag to where I want it to end. If it was centered, I would have to guess at where the lines would meet, which would make accurate placement more difficult. If the majority of people would prefer it centered, I'm certainly open to making changes.
As far as the panning behavior, that was a request from users, because they said it was difficult to annotate at the bottom of the page with the old design, so I allow the page to be scrolled up past the bottom of the screen. I don't currently allow that for the top, as it would either make it difficult to lock the page back in its starting position. It would feel like the page is floating around if it didn't lock at least to the top of the screen.
The only other way to zoom that I support right now is Ctrl + Mouse wheel. The app is designed primarily for tablets, and I try to accommodate desktop users when possible. I can think about supporting other ways of zooming in the future that are more compatible with a mouse, such as having a zoom slider that appears in the annotation mode at the bottom right that is only visible when mouse movement is detected. If people would like having a zoom slider in general, I may consider adding one, but it just performs a center zoom on the screen, so that's not the easiest to use.
(10-17-2020, 09:28 AM)MartinH Wrote: The pen is quite fast and and precise, but when I zoom in, it becomes very noticeable that it only draws additional points in the line after moving a certain distance, making it impossible to accurately draw any fine shapes. My use case is trying to write text on the page at about the same size as the printed lyrics , and the resulting text looks very poor. Maybe this threshold could become smaller related to the zoom amount.
As a feature request, I would like to be able to change the size of my arrow heads. They get bigger with line thickness, but even the smallest head is too big for some places I would like to place arrows.
I found a workaround for the zooming issue. Zoom in BEFORE entering annotation mode. Then make you annotation with pen. Then zoom out. The line is now scaled down so select it and resize to desired setting.
As for the arrow, resizing it to you personal preference would of course be awesome but maybe this is not high priority now. However if adding another arrow with a filled tip is an easy thing to do I would love that. Like this unicode: U+1F812. This is the one I use in all my scores.
Surface Pro 8, i5, Windows 11
Pageflip Firefly Pedal
Just to note, many things are being raised because you seem interested in all suggestions, and going into extreme detail about them. But I understand that these are pretty nitpicky details, and are probably very low priority for development right now.
Arrowheads: A single scale factor sounds perfect, but it's understandable if it's not a priority.
Hairpins: I generally like the idea of combining them (just to save toolbar space), I can see that people might find it less intuitive to figure out. So I don't have a big preference either way and wouldn't try to make more work for you.
That's not what this suggestion was about, though. I was just noticing that they can only be dragged in one direction, and nothing happens backwards. Generally, having an action do nothing can be confusing, so allowing them to be created backwards would alleviate this. They would still create the same symbol (it wouldn't reverse), but you could start on either direction. This is quite a trivial addition, though.
Hairping centring: Again this is nitpicky, but since we're discussing it... The idea is that when you first click, the min-size is created centred on your pointer, but as you drag it past the minimum distance, it would slide so that the start and end points still correspond to exactly where you clicked and released. It's hard to describe, and don't know how to create an animation of this, but the process would be:
- Click down and min-size symbol appears centred on where you clicked
- Drag right, and while your dragging distance is less than the minimum width of the symbol, the symbol moves right so that it's halfway between the starting and current pointer location
- One you've dragged exactly the minimum width, the start and end points are exactly at the click location and current pointer location.
- If you keep dragging, the symbol extends, still matching the start and end points.
Panning: Your explanation of why you can pan up but not down is fine. I don't see a problem with it, it was just unexpected.
Zooming without a tablet: I think using ctrl-mouse wheel is good enough, but it doesn't seem to work for me so I guess I'm seeing another bug.
Right-click select tool: I completely understand that it's not important enough to put major effort into right now.
I really appreciate all the feedback and ideas. I get a little overwhelmed because I want to deliver on what people are asking for and I want people to know that there is a good reason if I don't implement their suggestions.
I am working on allowing crescendo and decrescendo marks to be flipped. I think I'll still support both tools (because it's still nicer not to have to flip the shape when making minimum size crescendos/decrescendos), but this will make it more flexible for people. Everything is working except for resizing them after they are created - still have some bugs in that logic.
I completely understand your suggestion for how to center the hairpin but still allow it to be increased in size. However, I think that it will be very unintuitive to users to have the crescendo/decrescendo move on them after dragging, and they will most likely think it's a bug of some kind. I think for now I'm going to leave it as is, as it works well for increasing past the minimum size, and I don't have a feel yet for how often people will create the minimum size vs enlarging it.
There is a bug with ctrl + mouse wheel zooming that is already fixed that I haven't released yet. The next update should fix that. I forgot to mention this.
Cmart - I will write up an enhancement request for adding additional arrows and settings for them. This will be planned for a later release, as I don't think it's essential for the initial release.
10-18-2020, 06:12 PM (This post was last modified: 10-19-2020, 01:05 AM by DonC.)
(10-18-2020, 12:28 PM)Zubersoft Wrote: Cmart - I will write up an enhancement request for adding additional arrows and settings for them. This will be planned for a later release, as I don't think it's essential for the initial release.
Could you add up and a down arrow characters to the stamps? That would be enough for my use.
Of course I can (and will) otherwise add a custom stamp.
Don
Il ne faut pas rouler vite... il faut freiner tard
The stamps are based on music fonts. If the fonts don't have an up or down arrow, then you'll be better off adding your own custom stamp. I'm going to track requests I get for different kinds of stamps. If I continue to get frequent requests for certain kinds of stamps that are not currently included, then I'll have to devise a way to add them.
- Based on Cmart's suggestion about lack of resolution in the pen when zooming in, I tried zooming in before entering annotation mode. It does seem to affect the resolution of the pen, as well as the thickness. While this helps me work around the rough-looking pen drawing, it seems a bit odd that my line thicknesses end up different depending on the zoom level when I started annotating.
- It seems Box eraser causes some strange behaviour. If I draw a rectangle with line and fill, then erase it with the box eraser, it only erases the line, not the fill. If I then erase with the Tap eraser, it removes the fill, but doesn't highlight correctly while it's doing it.
- If I draw arrors or hairpins, then delete them with the box eraser, they disappear, but don't seem to be really deleted. If I shut down the app and restart it, they reappear. Or before restarting, I drag over where they used to be with the Tap eraser, a highlight appears, and it seems they're really deleted.
- I saw my previously-reported problem about delete highlighting becoming very large while playing with the Box and Tap erasers. I still don't have a reliable reproduction procedure, but it seems related to this. A general process seems to be: draw a box; delete with the box eraser; delete the remaining fill with the tap eraser; do this multiple times; then draw another box and delete with the tap eraser.
- The stamp tool is pretty slow to open. Clicking to select the tool is quick, but clicking again to open the palette of symbols takes about 2 seconds the first time I use it. I'm using a Surface Go 2 with an m3 processor, so it's not exactly a powerhouse, but it's pretty noticeable.
(10-19-2020, 08:55 AM)Zubersoft Wrote: I'm going to track requests I get for different kinds of stamps. If I continue to get frequent requests for certain kinds of stamps that are not currently included, then I'll have to devise a way to add them.
Mike
In current stable version 2.9.6 I can't find "accent" stamp. One of the most used/common articulation signs in music.
