Need Vector Art....
Danni Coy (rgcoy@midcoast.com.au) wrote:
Background.
Ok at the moment I have 2 reasons for booting Windows on my system. One
is a Musical sequencing package and my pro soundcard. The other is the
lack of a descent vector art package (on windows I use a combination of
Expression2 and flash3).
After playing with a package called autotrace it occured to me that it
would be not too difficult to set up a program that will allow me to
create basic vector strokes and fills with my wacom tablet...
Paint with pencil type tool onto bitmap(ie one bit per pixel) Convert
this to a vector at the end of each stroke....
You might want to look at sketch and sodipodi. Maybe you'll find what
you are looking for. But both have IIRC no explicit tablet support.
Questions....
1) At this point I could either start on a simple stand alone app or try
and extend an existing project like the gimp.(gimp 1.3 code seems to be
a lot more readable). Which would be better at this point.
I am not sure. To extend Gimp with a general vector infrastructure (in
fact I am working on something like this, but progress is slow since I
am very busy with other stuff right now) a lot of work has to be done.
Starting a new project would be silly in my eyes. There are some
interesting vector programs out there and the gimp is not the most
obvious possible target.
2)Is the brush code now modular enough to allow me to create a new brush
tool for creating vector strokes. (ultimately this would be very simular
to the pencil.
Currently this is not possible. It would be cool though.
3) I know that dynamic text creates its own special layers... Is the
system robust enough to allow the creation of 'vector' layers?
You can attach arbitrary data to regular layers. This is waht dynamic
text does. You can modify text rendered by dynamic text with all tools,
however, if you change the text it will get re-rendered and all changes
are lost. Of course someone could do the same with the gfig plugin.
It is planned to make this mechanism more generic. For example to have
adjustment layers or - as you intended - to have real vector layers.
4) Gimp already uses a library (libart?) to do raster to vector
conversions does anybody know how this compares to autotrace?
libart is used to do vector -> raster conversions and is thus exactly
the opposite thing to autotrace :-)
It is mainly used to convert bezier-curves to selections.
Hope this helps,
Simon
