GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 128068
Brush Spacing options should be accessible from the tool options
Last modified: 2014-11-13 12:52:23 UTC
This should be for gimp 2.0.x, or for 2.2, I am just openning it lest I forget. The new tool options for the painting tools in GIMP pre 2.0 allows for many things, including changing the brush used, and for this, a configurable view of all existing brushes. However,the brush spacing, a vital parameter to the final effect of the tool is just visible if one displays the separated brushes dialog. Therefore, I believe the GIMP will become more usable if the spacing options is visible in the tool options, or when one selects a brush in the tool options.
That would need quite some redesign. The brush spacing is part of the brush, not a tool option. If you change the spacing of a brush, all tools using the same brush are affected. Will need some further thinking, definitely nothing for 2.0.
This is related to some of my ideas I came up with after talking to you about brush redesigns. I think right now there is an arbitrary distiction between the options encoded in the brush file (like atom spacing) and the options encoded with the tool (like pressure sensitivity). I would really like to move some ideas around internally here. The concept of a brush should be "pix map + tool options" and constructing brushes involves choosing a pix map and all the tool options associated with it. And when picking a pixmap out of the brush dialog, it should recall all the tool options as well. This is how paint shop pro and photoshop work and I think it is a simpler model than what we use now. Now the gimp has some rendering parameters stored in the brush file and some of them stored in the tool context when these options, concepually, are identically in my head.
I basically agree with you here but I don't see this happening for 2.2. But let's see...
Well, actually "the options encoded in the brush file" is just spacing (correct me if i'm wrong here), and spacing has the problem that it somehow belongs both to the brush *and* to the tool options. The brush designer has a good reason to choose the given default spacing, and the user has good reasons to change this value. So why not make the tool options brush spacing just be a factor which gets multiplied with the brush's own spacing?
because user wants to set it in pixels, not in some bizarre ratio.
No, *you* want to set it to pixels :) When I select a brush, I look how large the brush preview is in the canvas after selecting it. I don't care about its pixels size. When I change the spacing, I want it "about twice that size" or something, and I don't care about pixels either. IMHO having the user enter pixel values is the worst kind of UI we coud implement here.
Slider covers "about half that size" aspect of the issue. User should not have to enter pixels and needs to have dynamic tweaking options, but should be able to enter the value and have feedback in pixels. Once you have that spacing trimmed out you may need to ie. reuse it on another brush. IMHO the same should also apply to scale.
Let's look at what to do with this in the context of the GSoC 2009 Brush Dynamics project scheduled for inclusion in 2.8.
Postponing to 2.10.
A lot work has happened in 2.8 regarding this, maybe we can finish it off in 2.10?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 738005 ***