[scribus-dev] bringing the indigo into scribus

[ale rimoldi]

hey

during the last two weeks i had (again) a look at the indigo UI
proposal martin did a few years ago and started working on some
"simple" tasks that

- are in the spirit (and heavily inspired by) indigo UI and
- are rather easy to implement.

what i'd like to mainly focus is to let the user have on screen as many
formatting options (and actions) as possible, without the need to move
around windows:

for now, this is done by:

- getting the widgets to adapt to the current selection (mainly the
  content palette)
- shrinking the widgets so that the user can better use the screen
  real estate (and avoid expanding sections as much as possible)


in this first step, i will skip the extreme modularization of the
widgets because:

- it's much harder to do
- i'm still not sure it's a good idea (imo, scribus should present a
  good, well thought UI... and flexibility is not a good replacement
  for quality. but if there is a real need for flexibility, once the the
  UI is good: let's do the next step!)




here is what i already did:

first,there is a patch from last january:

Content Palette with Text and Image Properties
https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15551

this patch should be reviewed, tested and applied as soon as possible.
please.

as far i can tell, there is one more pane that should be moved to the
content palette: the "group" one.

but that pane contains formatting both for the "content" and for the
frame.

i had a look and produced this patch:

Properties palette: why is there a Group tab?
https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15812

this patch removes the "flow" and "transparency" parts from the group
section and lets the groups use the "standard" flow and transparency
sections of the PP.

testing is needed to see, if indeed the code still works correctly (i
could not find out why the panes were duplicated in there, so there is
a risk that this split might not be a good idea...)

when both patches above are accepted, i plan to create further patch
and move the group tab to the content palette.



finally, on the "shrinking side", i've worked on the shape tab:

Indigo UI: shrink the "shape" tab of the properties palette
https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15811

it's basically martin's proposal with ideas taken from

Simplify UI of even-odd vs. nonzero filling rules
https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=12277




if there is some interest, i can produce an appimage that can be used
on "any" linux computer with all those patches together.



the next step will be a the restyling of xyz tab, but before starting
it, i'd really love to see the patches above reviewed, eventually
fixed and finally integrated into scribus.




so, jean and craig, can you a timeframe, so that i can plan my further
work on it?

ciao
a.l.e