[Kst] Re: branches/work/kst/portto4/kst/src

[Nicolas Brisset]

Barth,

I'm sorry I didn't have time to look into the issue and answer your questions as you asked them. From what I understood by quickly reading the mail exchanges, it seemed to make sense, however. And you made a lot of nifty changes :-)
 
Now I'm trying to figure it out from a user perspective, i.e. looking at the dialog and trying to guess what will happen. I have a couple of issues/questions:
0) basic question: did you change the format of .kst files? And if you did, could it impact users? This is important for the forthcoming release announcement...
1) "Apply to existing objects" could be improved:
   - the ability to apply only to selected should be easy to add and would bring a lot
   - maybe we need the ability to select objects by type (rectangles, ellipses, ...), or at least to distinguish plot borders from the rest
   - plot borders sometimes use the new brush color, but not always. I still don't know why/when
2) do we really want to expose all those properties in the theme dialog? I doubt users will know what to do with brush style, join style or cap style. I'd say the first three (which I'd call "line style", "line width" and "line color" are enough for 99% of the cases. Especially brush style and style seem to me to overlap quite a bit for our use case.
3) grid lines are not affected by changes made in this dialog, which will probably look pretty bad according to the settings chosen for stroke. However, it can still be changed from the plot dialog. This is more a consistency issue.
4) after thinking about it for a few minutes, I realize the theme dialog is only a shortcut allowing to apply a bunch of visual changes easily without having to go into all the separate dialogs. Plus annotation objects don't have a multiple edit dialog and edit on multiple selections apply only on the last selected object (why actually?), so it would be very cumbersome going into each. I think we have to make that clearer somehow. Maybe I'll add a label to the dialog... And if that's what it is, I believe making it simpler as mentioned in point 2) makes all the more sense.

Once we resolve those fairly small issues, I think we can consider this feature to be done. Very nice!

Nicolas

----- "Barth Netterfield" <netterfield at astro.utoronto.ca> a écrit :

> SVN commit 1238324 by netterfield:
> 
> BUG: 274321
> BUG: 274322
> BUG: 274323
> 
> Finish revamping the view item defaults system.  There is now a
> Settings->Theme dialog
> which sets brush, stroke, and font for all view items, optionally
> applying to all existing
> objects, and/or saving as the default for all future objects.
> 
> Furthermore, all view objects can save their current status as the
> default for that
> particular type from their own dialogs.
> 
> Tabs can now have their own background, on a per tab basis.
> 
> It is now easy to change an entire kst session from black on white to
> white on black.
>