Hi!
I recently purchased a Wacom tablet and have been trying to use
it not only for painting/coloring, but sketching/lineart.
After some getting used to it control is not that much less
than working on paper.
But I soon noticed problems with long curves especialy in vertical
direction. Working analogue I just turn the paper (or alter my own
position acordingly). Something similar should be possible in the
digital world ...
Now Painter supports rotating the view without affecting the image,
and so should the GIMP. There's a bug report here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55367
Like stated there I'm willing to provide mockups, but after looking
at Painter Classic there is not much to mockup.
There should be a tool in toolbox for rotating the view. The icon
would be an open circle with arrowheads (I offer to provide that
... are there any guidelines or notes how the existing icons came
to be?). I think it should be a seperate tool from the existing
rotate one, because it isn't destructive/undoable.
Rotation would happen by just click-dragging anywhere in the canvas
area. It could be nice to indicate the rotation center, but it's
not needed. Resetting to 0 should be possible by clicking on the
empty canvas area. A doubleclick might also do the trick.
Of course for a fluid workflow there would have to be something
faster than actualy switching tools. It's just great to have panning
on middle 'mouse' button (one of the details where GIMP has an
advantage over PS). Would it be possible to trigger rotation on
left-drag, when middle button is held down? Else it could work with
middle button and Ctrl.
View rotation could also be triggered by right-drag on the panning
tool in the scrollbar corner. Could also have it's own place instead
of the 'Set canvas padding color' thing. However, in the popup window
a line would be drawn from the initial pointer location to the actual
one to indicate center of rotation and pointer location. Ok, something
to mockup, but not before I hear something positive ...
And now for something else:
Because tablet and monitor aspect ratio don't match, and distortion
free mapping is needed for serious graphical work, there's always some
unused tablet area.
Now there are those special fields (new/1, open/2, ...) on larger wacoms
and special support from the Windows driver. But having to look at the
tablet is stupid anyway. How about mapping the unused area to a special
window, that will appear on the screen edge, when the pen is in that
area? This window could be filled with editable commands and settings.
I bring this up here, because GIMP is the only app with special tablet
support on Linux (I know of), and the one where I would expect the
largest benefit from such functionality.
---
Thorsten Wilms
