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Issue 8875 is related. |
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yes and no... most of the time you can solve your problems by - moving one or both of the elements to the top or the bottom and than moving up or down the other one - placing the elements on different layers. this gives you an elegant solution for most cases... there are indeed some few cases, where a better handling of the level would be handy, but in most of those cases, a grouping by page does not help that much either... ... there must be a good way... |
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This is necessary to redesign. Scribus handles levels very awkwardly. If you are doing complex graphics with pictures, actual way is horrible. It is too slow for manipulating with that. Creating new layers because Scribus handles layers within whole document is provisional solution. Levels should be handled only within each page - separately. This is common in graphical programs. Layers are handled very nicely by (for example) Xara Xtreme. It compare only objects with overlay. It is very effective. |
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@ale [quote]this gives you an elegant solution for most cases...[/quote] I do not agree. This works in some cases or with small / simple documents. If you have a large and complex doc, rearranging frames can be a real pain. I made a screenshot just in case my description was not clear enough. |
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level.png (63,438 bytes) |
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Keep Scribus simple as possible. If levels will be implemented correctly, no new editable field is necessary. Even it will be possible to remove this number. |
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@alib: scribus is not a vector graphics editor... one thing i would like to have, to solve this problem, are frames which could load vector graphics: - you would be doing your complex graphics in inkscape - import them into a frame which won't rasterize them - the whole graphic is seen as one object (and possibly shown as a low res bitmap preview to speed up the work...) i'm not against a better handling of layers and z-position... but we should really focus on scribus becoming a very good DTP app, not a tool which does everything you can dream of... imho... |
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@ale What have layers have in common with vectors? The point on this issue is, how can we make level changing of frames easier. I think everybody agrees, that the current level handling could be improved. |
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As long there already is numeric indicator on level number making it editable won't ruin conception and simplicity of Scribus and won't block any elegant way. Mike's view is also reasonable: few frames could be arranged without even looking at its level number, but when one have big stack of frames he'll hardly remember all its numbers, so editable number doesn't much help... As for me hotkeys are usually enough for arranging items. For REALLY complex projects we should extend outlines box by making hierarchy of items visible and visually editable (related to http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=4602). |
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I explain how it works: Example: Imagine you have one rectangle and many parallel lines below that. You need to raise the line in the lowest level above the rectangle. Scribus: You must change level for example 20 times - very slow. Inkscape, Xara: You will done this only by ONE click! It's what I am talking about. It isn't necessary (possible) to show number of levels because (as I suppose it doesn't count levels like Scribus but also compare levels of overlap items; probably when you change levels of isolated objects it "skip" for example 20 objects which would have number between them). The second improvement would be NUMBERING within only ONE PAGE. I don't know how it is handled inside the graphical program, but it works really well. It's difficult to describe. The best is to open Inkscape or Xara and test it. |
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Mike, I tried to find this magic "one click" in Xara and IS, but I failed... Only top/bottom/raise/lower buttons. Can you be more specific? |
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There are no more buttons. But this buttons top/bottom/raise/lower works just little another way as compared with Scribus. I signed on IRC, we can chat about this subject online :-) |
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while the top and bottom buttons are somehow useful, i only use the up and down ones only because they are the only way to change the levels of the created items. personally, i'd prefer to have the following two ways of interacting with the levels: - by defining a new order in the outline palette - move an object above / below another in a new tab of the align and distribute palette (which we could maybe rename to "position" or something similar). |
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i sincerely agree with ale's second proposal : the user should be able to select 2 objects and say, "invert stack order" |
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Moving level on the outline palette would require to change their display order so as to otpionnaly display them by level instead of by hierarchical structure, and then being able to drag and drop one of them. Reference here is more phototoshop or Gimp layer window. |
- Anonymous
