New Feature: Add a Tools menu and tool Toolbars #307

[Douglas]

Hey everyone… I’m just finishing up with this issue " New Feature: Add a Tools menu and tool Toolbars #307" and before pushing the changes I want to verify something that’s been driving me crazy. It has to do with the “Tool Options” dock and how the contents are displayed. Normally the tool property widgets are displayed NOT expanding, but at some point I noticed on my builds the property widgets are expanding - as shown in the screen caps below:

I’ve gone over the mainwindow and dock form and the PropertyBrowser 3rd party code that creates the tool property dock contents and I can’t find anything that I might have changed to cause the widgets to expand???.. so I can only think it must be something related to my build kit and or compiler used. The dock on the left was with a recent Seamly2D weekly build off of Github while the right is the most recent build on my machine.

In a nutshell… Is anyone else getting the expanding widgets when the dock is resized? I don’t know if it already exists? I certainly don’t want to introduce this behavior, but it’s not a problem at this time if it’s just on my machine producing this. I wouldn’t mind so much if the widget values where top aligned and not centered vertically - it’s rather distracting.

[Grace]

Hello @Douglas

I had that for a few days about a week ago and it was driving me crazy! But I managed to fix it, but now I can’t remember how. I think it was something with the Ctrl/Mouse Wheel to zoom in & zoom out.

I’m trying to recreate the problem, but it’s not happening.

[Clauettedu02]

Bonjour,

Personnellement je ne constate aucun problème.

A bientôt

[alinegesualdi]

Hi Douglas,

That never happened with me in MacOs, but in Windows10 it does.

Best, Aline

[Douglas]

@alinegesualdi

That never happened with me in MacOs, but in Windows10 it does.

It’s driving me nuts… just spent another couple hours playing with the Property Browser code, and something is overriding the size and alignment policies of the dock contents. This only appears to happen when I build on either of my 2 laptops - Windows 8 and Windows 10. If I run a build downloaded from Github the contents does not expand. And I can;t get the contents of the formula line edits to top align… they’re always vertically centered - which I’ve determined is the default setting for a new QLineEdit.

[Douglas]

@Grace

I had that for a few days about a week ago and it was driving me crazy! But I managed to fix it, but now I can’t remember how. I think it was something with the Ctrl/Mouse Wheel to zoom in & zoom out.

It’s not the zoom… it’s when the size of the Tool Options (Properties Editor) dock is vertically resized. With any build not compiled on my machines results in the formula line edits not expanding, but when I run a build compiled on my machine the line edits expand and align vertically. I have even changed the code in the Property Browser lib, and something is overriding the size and alignment settings.

Like I said if it’s only affecting builds on my machine I’ll figure it out when I dig into cleaning up the tool dialogs & the tools Properties Editor.

[Douglas]

@alinegesualdi

but in Windows10 it does.

With a build you’ve made on a Windows 10 machine? - or with a Github weekly download? I only seem to experience the expanding line edits with my builds with Creator.

[Douglas]

With addressing the new tool toolbar & menus feature - I took the liberty to fix some of the inconsistences in the line & curve tool names and tooltips, and eventually I will address the tool dialogs & Tool Options AKA Property editor dock, as well as refactoring all the mishmash of names in the code itself to match.

Take for ex the Curved Path tool - it’s “Curved Path” in the dialog, “Tool for path curve” in the browser, “Curved Path” in the tooltip and is referred to as “spline path” in the code.

Using the term path doesn’t even make sense in the context that is used… all curves have a path. A series of bezier curves is often referred to as a “compound bezier curve”, or “spline” for short.

Therefore to simplify things…we have curves and splines - no more simple, cubic, bezier, path, segment, or cut to confuse things.

Curve Tool:

Spline Tool:

Curve w/ Control Points

Spline w/ Control Points

Point along Curve:

Point along Spline:

Also another change is the use of “Contact point”… it will now properly be referred to as “Tangency point” .

Tangency Point of Circle and Tangent:

Tangency Point of Arc and Tangent:

[Douglas]

Hey everyone… I figured out the expanding issue with the Tool Options dock widgets. It dawned on me that the propertyexplorer.dll is an external lib and not an internal library - so without copying the recompiled lib into the app folder none of the test changes I was making had any effect. DOH. I’m still not exactly sure why / where the expansion difference between a github build and my machine’s build is coming from, but I suspect when compiling it may be picking up style ques from the build system? At any rate, I have deciphered the way in which the propertyexplorer lib generates the dock tool widgets on the fly, so I’ll be able to reformat them to match the tool dialogs.

With that being said here’s an overview of the changes for issue #307

The menus have been reorganized with the addition of a “Tools” menu. Addition of a toolbar for the ToolBox and for each tool group - which of course can be moved or hidden to suit one’s preference. The existing Toolbox has been placed in a dock so it can now also be moved or hidden.

Here’s a look at the menus & toolbars:

You may notice the “Windows” menu is gone. It only contained the item “Close Pattern” which was clearly in the wrong menu… since it’s a file related action it belongs in the File menu as such: (BTW Open also has the standard Ctrl+O shortcut now)

The undo functions now reside in an Edit menu as such:

The View menu contains mode items… which are now relabeled as “Draft” and “Piece”, keeping “Layout” as is. Also the zoom actions can be accessed here. The Docks and Toolbars can be toggled on / off here (as well as via the usual toolbar right mouse button context menu):

Then there’s the new Tools menu. You may notice that “Pattern Piece” has now become “Draft Block” - which applies while in Draft Mode. “Details” will be known :Pattern Pieces"… and well things added to a pattern piece will now be a “Detail”. Also of note “Config Pattern Piece” becomes “Rename Draft Block”. The tools themselves are mirrored from the Toolbox tool groups - with the exception of the new 'Pattern Pieces" - info on that below. Shown is the Point tools submenu… you may notice that all the tools now have a key shortcut sequence.

The “Detail” toolbox group has been split into two… “Add Details” for those tools that deal with adding details in Draft mode:

and 'Pattern Piece" for those tools that apply to pieces while in Piece mode.

One of the new toolbars is the Toolbox toolbar… which mirrors the Toolbox dock and Tools menu. You can have access to all the tools in a much smaller space than the Toolbox dock. You can place it in any of the 4 dock locations. The rest of the Toolbars should be self explanatory… each one represent one of the tool groups and you can configure the UI for which ever ones you want visible.

Last visible update is the improvement of the Status toolbar and tooltips. The cursor position is now explicitly shown as XPos, YPos with a 2 decimal places of accuracy. The tooltip will now display the Tool: < tool group > - < tool > followed by instructions.

Oh… and the term “sticking angle” has been changed to “constrain angle”.

I probably forgot something else… but I think it’s time to rip this bandaid off.

[Douglas]

@Douglas

I probably forgot something else

Oh… the Tool Options dock becomes the :“Property Editor” and the “flipping” tools were renamed “Mirror by Axis” and “Mirror by Line”. I may do a quick fix on the tool dialogs to reflect these and a few other tool names before really digging into cleaning up the dialogs and the tools in the Property Editor dock… which will take some work.

[Pneumarian]

WOW!! I’m looking forward to the Official Release! I especially like that “flipping” is changing to “mirror”! I think it more clearly communicates what to expect.

[Douglas]

@Pneumarian

I especially like that “flipping” is changing to “mirror”! I think it more clearly communicates what to expect.

Yeah… Susan recently created a Githhub issue for fixing the flip->mirror naming. I already was addressing it in this update. Just need to refactor the code stuff later no one sees - except for the schema attributes. I’ll change the schema at some point in the future when I actually need to change it with any new features. I think it’s just more efficient to group schema changes together, rather than have a bunch of conversion that will slow down loading older patterns as it’s a recursive process of converting to the next newest pattern ver until you reach the current version.

Oh… BTW - I thought of another fix in here - the zoom scrolling speed pref issue.