It's clearly broken right now. I can see it might have been used even to
progressively shift aligned items, but this was not used anymore. As for being
used while distributing, it doesn't make any sense anymore with the new logic of
not moving the extreme (first/last in coordinates) items.
I can see how an additional concept of offset can be useful in some situations,
but for now, let's get rid of this. We'll see in the future if someone asks for
it and provides valid use cases to work from.
- Adding a separate pivot widget to allow choosing which point of the items we
align or distribute. E.g. until now, we could only align the right side of
objects to the right side of the reference object, left to left and center to
center. Now these are independent. Therefore I can align the left side of
objects to the right border of a selection or a layer, and so on.
- Only keep 2 "distribute" buttons (for now). Most of the distribution actions
were basically broken or extremely hard to understand. Also they were
apparently mixing concepts of alignments with distributions. Now let's
basically only keep the bases: horizontal or vertical distributions.
Everything is still possible using a mix of alignment and distribution
buttons, and it's much clearer.
- Since the GimpAlignmentType was used nearly only there (except for some usage
like to store dock side or filter preview split direction, but these
GIMP_ARRANGE_* values were unused there), I removed the various enum values
which we don't use anymore.
- The Reference settings gets its own subsection in the Align tool options.
Until now, it looked like it only applied to alignment, whereas it applies to
distribution too.
Note: this is still work-in-progress, mostly some initial dev work to put some
algorithmic bases. We had some UI and specification discussions with Aryeom
already and some things might still change a lot.
When the reference is a guide in particular, no distribution is possible (on one
dimension, the size is 0, on the other, it's infinite) and alignment is only
possible in one direction (depending on guide orientation).
Instead of using the layer borders, we use the bounding box for the contents.
This is similar to first run "Crop to Content" on every selected layer except
we don't actually need to crop. Therefore we can work on bigger layer than the
actual content while still arranging them based on content bounds.
So often the result of alignment/distribution feels wrong because it doesn't
correspond to the content we are seeing. With this option, we'll have the option
to choose the desired behavior.
The old interaction was quite horrible. I don't think I ever really got a good
use of it. It was so hard to understand what you were picking and so on.
Now that we can multi-select items, let's just use this as the base of what we
want to align or distribute. Clicking on canvas will now mostly be used to pick
an item as reference. From now on, only the reference object will get on-canvas
handle, making it very obvious how your alignment or distribution will work.
I leave only an alternative picking method (with Alt or Shift-Alt pick) to add
guides to objects to align or distributes, as these don't have a selection
dockable.
I'm also improving the selection of stacked layers by looping through them
(similar as the layer selection on canvas feature) so that we can select even
background layers which have a lot of layers showing above.
I am planning to improve this tool even further, but this is a first step to
make it actually usable within the new multi-item interaction logic.
The Align Tool had to be used in a very hacky way if one
intended to evenly distribute items across an image,
or other reference object (it would actually require one to
calculate the item spacing out of GIMP). This adds vertical
and horizontal fill modes: the reference object is divided
in N equal segments, where N is the number of items,
and each item is placed in the center of one of
these segments. The existing "offset" parameter
is used as an extra margin for the distribution,
and can be set to negative values, so that the items can
even get moved outside the boundaries of the reference object.
2009-01-17 Michael Natterer <mitch@gimp.org>
* all files with a GPL header and all COPYING files:
Change licence to GPLv3 (and to LGPLv3 for libgimp).
Cleaned up some copyright headers and regenerated the parsers in
the ImageMap plugin.
svn path=/trunk/; revision=27913
* app/core/gimpimage-arrange.[ch]: added, utility function for
aligning and arranging things in an image.
* app/core/gimpitem-align.[ch}: removed, no longer needed.
* app/core/gimpimage-item-list.[ch] (gimp_image_item_list_align):
removed this function, no longer used.
* app/core/Makefile.am: changes described above.
* app/core/gimpguide.c: remove bit of cruft left accidentally.
* app/tools/gimpalignoptions.[ch]: remove "alignment type"
option, not needed at this point.
* app/tools/gimpaligntool.[ch]: numerous changes, most
importantly ability to align guides, and use them for
alignment. More work coming on this tool.
