impending doom - new layers structure

[Bart Coppens]

On Wednesday 21 December 2005 19:54, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> note: it was my intention to use the cached pixel rendering of the part
> layers to allow filters etc to work on part layers -- as a kind of
> adjustment layers.
Well that's possible currently, and sad but true: I find it utterly confusing 
(at least in its current incarnation), and would like to get rid of that 
behaviour. Some of the problems:

* You'd like to edit a part after you applied a filter to it. No problem, but 
if the previously applied filters did something to lay a 'glow' around the 
letters in the part, for example. Then editing the text will give a wrong 
glow.

* You want to activate the part by (double) clicking on it. But tools also 
want to be activated when you click on a (part)layer. Currently, any requests 
to click on the part itself are directed to the KOffice embedding code. 
Probably it's possible redirect only double clicks, but that could get messy

* Say that you _would_ be able to implement the previous point. With the paint 
tool, paint something above the place where the part resides at the moment. 
No problem, since it is a paint device as well. Now doubleclick on the part, 
so that it activates, and just exit the part directly after activating. The 
part will redraw itself again on the canvas, removing the paint.

* Just try to imagine selecting half of the part, and moving it around. Now it 
is in half, and the next time you activate it, you have a part and a half on 
screen...

And probably I could think of lots of more problems ;-) While the idea is a 
good one, I fear it is just not clear enough what exactly will happen to the 
painting at one time due to the fact that we'll have 2 independently 
changeable representations of a single (part of a) layer.

Possible solution: make it possible of the parts layer to have 2 orthogonal 
modes: embedded and paintable. As long as you are in embedded, you can't 
paint, and as long as you're in paintable, you can't activate the embedding. 
And then use a switch (with a warning dialog) to change modes. But that as 
well is maybe not really good from a user interface point of view...

Bart Coppens