Re: [libreoffice-design] Re: Proposal to improve layer handling and object selection

Hi Stuart,

V Stuart Foote schrieb:
> Well, seems the elephant in the room regards making the GUI functional might
> be to open discussion of Draw's internals.

As LibreOffice does not work on file formats directly, it has always an 
internal model. And therefore you need to discuss, whether and how 
things can be expressed in this internal model, what has to be changed 
and add to the model, and which long-term development goal exists for 
the internal model.

That should not prevent us from improving the GUI. The GUI is about 
manipulating the object properties. And there exists always a lot of 
ways how that can be done. But it creates problems, if assumption about 
a property were made, which are not true.

> Don't some of the limitations of ODF 1.2 slip away if we could instead move
> our vector format natively to SVG, and retaining raster format in BMP meta?
> That coupled with document saves to standards compliant SVG or PNG for
> vector or bitmap respectively.
>
> And relegate ODF 1.2 Drawing to be only an import/export option--rather than
> the default format for the Draw module.

I think, that it would not reduce problems. SVG is not the only 
standard, which has to be considered. LibreOffice needs to import/export 
to DrawingML of the Office Open XML standard as well. And

LibreOffice has a rich API and you cannot drop these services and 
interfaces. As LibreOffice will not work on the SVG source directly, the 
problem to represent the SVG features in an internal model would still 
exist.

Besides that, you cannot express all Draw features in SVG, e.g. SVG has 
no 3D objects.

And by the way, you are aware, that SVG has no layers at all?

> Are we functionally obligated to producing ODF 1.2 Drawing document?  I
> don't believe we are and filter export should suffice.

ODF is the native format of LibreOffice. As long as this holds true, 
LibreOffice should read and write ODF as best as possible.

As I mentioned earlier, currently already a kind of import and export is 
in place, because the informations from the file are not used directly, 
but converted into an internal model.

> Obviously, a bunch more work would be needed to break things and put them
> back together--but in the end we would get the functional capability users
> are asking for.  But without having to jump through hoops (or implement bad
> GUI) otherwise needed to maintain saving to ODF 1.2 Drawing document.

Besides the fact, that there exists not enough developers to implement a 
deep structural change, I think it would not help in making a better UI.

Kind regards
Regina


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