Set page background colour

[Jens Ratsey-Woodroffe]

Volker -

I've added some new toolbox buttons to set the page colour. Have
checked into my clone if you could take a look?

Thanks,
J.

[Volker Braun]

It would be good to have a way to select a paper background, but I think it should be combined with the line/rules selection and any additional gui elements like a calendar date picker. I've made a (very) rough sketch of how such a dialog could look like, see the attachment. 

This would then be implemented as a new Activity that gets called from the menu instead of the current DialogPaperType.java. In portrait orientation the preview should be under the form elements, I guess.

[Lars Wallin]

Guys,

It would be cool to be able to import any svg as paper type. This would mean adding great flexibility to Quill! :)

For variable fields in the page types, such as date or user name, we could come up with a convention for placeholders.

Such a feature could as an example make it possible for an architect to create a template page type with perspective lines, and add placeholders for meta data and system data.

I'll see if I can come up with a more specific feature suggestion asap.

Thanks,
Lars

[Lars Wallin]

Ps.

Suggestion:

Placeholders would be parsed  when loading the page type dialog.

Placeholders requesting data from other than the "system" namespace (such as date, time, user data etc) should be presented as a simple form with text fields.
.Ds

On Jan 6, 2012 4:54 PM, "Volker Braun" <vbrau...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Volker Braun]

SVG doesn't have a concept of variables, its only describes fixed 2d shapes similar to PDF. Also, supporting all SVG features would be a huge task. I've thought about a small subset of SVG, that would be possible but still isn't a great fit; We also need things like adding as many lines at given distance as possible.

[Jens Ratsey-Woodroffe]

I like the concept - empowering the user, and would open Quill for 'after market' add-ons.

I always drooled over the Microsoft Courier vaporware and would really like to see Quill implement as much functionality as possible that was slated for Courier. Search for the demo videos for the Courier  concept.

If we could pull it off, we'd kill. :-)

[Jens Ratsey-Woodroffe]

I'd like to see a toolbox that looks like this:

www.viddler.com/explore/engadget/videos/1174

... at 01:56

Appears on a long press, pen button click, etc.

[Lars Wallin]

There are a bunch of different ways to specify meta data in svg. And adding placeholders for variable data is no problem either if we use our own namespace.

Let we send over some examples :)

Regarding advanced svg features, that would indeed be a big task! just text and paths would do for now. I can make an Inkscape extension for Quill page type export  :)

[Volker Braun]

The Courier demo is very slick to look at, but I think I wouldn't have been able to discover half of the features shown. And I'm pretty good with computers ;-) Gestures are great for advanced users, but making them discoverable is hard. 

[Volker Braun]

There is an existing SVG library for android at http://code.google.com/p/svg-android/. I did think about using it for page backgrounds previously, but one would have to adapt it a bit for our needs. So maybe a custom xml format for page backgrounds would be better fit.

[Lars Wallin]

SVG can be a long term goal. And with an export plugin to transfsorm SVG to Quill it would still be easy to make your own patterns.

A good thing would of course be to make the xml "svg compliant", in other words use a subset of features. This would mean less work in future releases when we want to add shapes etc :)

[Lars Wallin]

For now I think Quill would use only paths and perhaps text :)

[Lars Wallin]

By the way, Quill can still keep its own optimized drawing logic internally. Don't break something that works ;)

The svg lib can be used for importing and rendering  backgrounds (as they are pretty much static after being rendered), and export for now.