On Fri, 22 Jun 2012 11:10:29 -0700 (PDT) Darrell Anderson humanreadable@yahoo.com wrote:
I tinkered some more with libreoffice draw, but still
can't draw a line with rounded ends. I
drew a rectangle with round edges. Looked nice until I
realized libreoffice draw had changed
the borders from "dashed" to solid/full all around the
image. Not sure what is up with that.
Incomplete support of the SVG standard, maybe?
I don't know. I thought about filing a bug report for that particular image, but I want to know more to ensure this is not a PEBKAC issue. :-)
I think it's ignoring part of the border's style information--see below for what I think the border actually is.
One question that comes to mind with respect to Karbon is, was any of the missing functionality added in the Calligra version? And if so, can any of it be backported?
I don't know but probably. For me, I don't care that we provide significant attention to the koffice apps, but they should all at least be functional. I rather we ripped karbon from the sources than provide crippled software that ends up being embarrassing to us.
Well, we could downgrade its version to XX.0.0-alpha. That would permit us to continue shipping it while acknowledging that it's problematic.
I'm tempted to file a Karbon mega-bug for milestone "Future" (as in, to be tackled when/if we have enough devs that some can be spared for nonessentials), with an interface mockup and a list of missing functionality.
Sounds like a good idea. With a punch list in the bug tracker we know where to focus. First item is add a pencil tool. :-)
Bug 1064: "Karbon functionality and UI improvements needed" filed, listing the deficiencies that I'm aware of at this time. I'll look at building an interface mockup when I have more time (might be QT4, but it'll be enough to get the idea across).
I don't know how these vector drawing apps are supposed to work, but with karbon I notice there is a limit to ungrouping. At that point I am clueless how to work with that final "element" or whatever is the correct term. For example, in the ark image you created, the outside border is actually smaller "dashes." At one point I wanted to grab only one of those dashes and stretch into a longer diagonal line --- because of the rounded ends. Perhaps the problem is how I think about these things because I don't use these apps.
I'm pretty sure the outside border of that particular image is a single line with a dash style applied, not a series of shorter lines. Extracting a single dash-bit in Inkscape would require two non-obvious actions (Object > Stroke to Path, Object > Break Apart), neither of which Karbon appears to support. (I don't consider that a deficiency in Karbon per se, as those are more advanced functions which aren't strictly necessary for a basic editor.)