Scratch

If it can help !!
I have discovered that Google Chrome Webstore offers a Shape/Sprite editor,  easy to make *.svg and/or  *.png shapes for sprite costumes

bharvey wrote:

I'm thinking there's not that much benefit to an internal paint editor, vs. just letting users use their favorite program offline, unless we can modify it to add things like setting the rotation point seamlessly.

It's actually really nice to be able to tweak things right inside the project — particularly to make pixel-perfect costumes. The incomplete/non-bitmap 2.0 paint editor is a pain...

bharvey wrote:

blob8108 wrote:

It's actually really nice to be able to tweak things right inside the project

Oh, I'm not saying we shouldn't have one, just that we shouldn't pick someone else's with restrictions on modifying and redistributing source code.  (And it should be in Javascript...)

The issue is the utilization of SVG files by Snap!
There are probably dozens of freeware paint editor for "pixel" shapes (Jpg,Gif,Png )
But freeware SVG shape editors are very rare.
For the moment Snap! can use SVG files as sprites (load them, move them etc) but such a Snap! application can't be SAVED.
Google provides one online Chrome Web Store Drawing editor for creating PNG, JPG and SVG shapes (to test Scratch 2.0 for example). This is far from meeting Snap! conditions, but it can be useful to know that it exists.

Last edited by xly (2013-02-17 06:05:27)

Hey Jens, this DOM 18 thing is really annoying (it also causes issues with "touching" blocks). Can you take a look at Canvg? It's a manual rasterizer—you can convert each SVG costume while opening a saved file.

Jens wrote:

not really rasterize them at all, if possible...

You mean, not unless the user explicitly says to, right?  blob8108 and I sometimes want to tweak the bits.  Even in Photoshop I rasterize things all the time because you can't floodfill them otherwise.

nXIII wrote:

don't most editors that support vector graphics let you do path unions/intersections/splits?

Probably, but when I try things like that, it never does what I want.  I think it's a good day in picture editing if Photoshop doesn't delete every file on my disk.  (And don't suggest GIMP, I know about that, but it never does what I want either.)

There seems to be some law saying that picture editing software is allowed to be designed only by the kind of idiot who thinks that shift-drag should mean to preserve the aspect ratio and unshift-drag should mean not to.   

Life is much easier with floodfill!

nXIII wrote:

Can I suggest Inkscape?

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

shadow_7283 wrote:

Err... isn't that standard? I mean, I can't think of a single program that doesn't use that key combination. Besides, how annoying would it be to have to hold shift every time you wanted to draw a non-regular rectangle?

I think he's talking about resizing things, where preserving aspect ratio is definitely the more common option.

Last edited by nXIII (2013-02-17 20:55:45)

nXIII wrote:

I think he's talking about resizing things, where preserving aspect ratio is definitely the more common option.

I was thinking of GIMP where drawing a rectangle means resizing a selection. That was just an example. More common option? What are some programs like that? Even Inkscape resizes objects in that manner (albeit with the control key).

Last edited by shadow_7283 (2013-02-17 21:13:27)

shadow_7283 wrote:

More common option? What are some programs like that?

Not "more common" as in "more programs"; "more common" as in "what people almost always want to do"!  (Not in the case of drawing rectangles, but in the case of resizing a graphic element.)

In the fifth grade where I volunteer, they try to teach kids how to make yearbook pages and slideshows and stuff, and the kids are totally oblivious to aspect ratio and just drag things out to fit some space, even if it's their own photo, with the result that they all look like fun house mirrors.  Good software would give oblivious people the correct result, namely that people should look like people.

I'm always amazed at how often software designers get obvious things wrong.  People are still suffering, for example, from the fact that 20-odd years ago, the designer of the Unix mail client (at Berkeley, sad to say) decided that "r" should mean "reply to everyone" and "R" (shifted) should mean "reply to sender."  (Mostly, I think, modern mail clients get this right, if they have keyboard commands at all, but some of my colleagues are even older than I am, still use /usr/bin/mail, and don't know how to reply-to-sender -- or they're just oblivious to the distinction, like fifth graders with aspect ratio.)

Sorry, it's been a long day of struggling with idiot software. 

bharvey wrote:

PS  I was just thinking of you...  Since you're a Windows person, do you know how to convince Word to make underlined headings in which the underline is continuous between the number it generates and the heading text, like this:

II.  Custom Blocks
-----------------------

instead of like this:

II.  Custom Blocks
---  ------------------

?

I don't have Word on this machine, but have you tried a paragraph border? It extends across the entire page width, so it would cover the heading and the number.

bharvey wrote:

shadow_7283 wrote:

Err... isn't that standard?

Yes, but only because all the authors of graphics editing programs are equally stupid.

PS  I was just thinking of you...  Since you're a Windows person, do you know how to convince Word to make underlined headings in which the underline is continuous between the number it generates and the heading text, like this:

II.  Custom Blocks
-----------------------

instead of like this:

II.  Custom Blocks
---  ------------------

?

There is a simple solution! Use LaTeX