Import graphics as objects into the document

[Kovid Goyal]

It would be nice to have the ability to import graphics files as objects that can be moved around, written upon, etc in the document. For ideas about a UI for this, you may want to look at http://research.microsoft.com/inkseine/

[Antonio Salazar (shadowfiend)]

Interesting. This is largely the idea I had in terms of interaction via the stylus, though I was not yet sure whether to go the way of radial menus or not. That will likely be the way to go. Importing graphics via drag 'n drop is somewhat more work, so initially I think it will be a simpler and, admittedly, more annoying process, but we should be able to improve that over time.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

I've found drag and drop (especially just drop) to be really easy to implement in Qt. If you like I can point you to some code that does this from one of my projects, though it is in python and for e-books, it should be easy to adapt. See for example lines 408-450 here http://libprs500.kovidgoyal.net/browser/trunk/src/libprs500/gui2/library.py

[Antonio Salazar (shadowfiend)]

It isn't very complicated, just somewhat so considering some of my other goals for a release -- like undo/redo and on-canvas interaction. I basically want to have a lightning-quick implementation of this, as with the SVG export, that can later be refined.

[Antonio Salazar (shadowfiend)]

FYI -- I am currently adding this in the add_non_tablet_items branch of Quill. Images and text can currently be dragged and dropped into Quill without any trouble, and text can be saved. I am right this second working on saving images (initially just to a sub-folder, with potentially a different solution to follow using a compressed archive to deal with everything or something of the sort).

Then I need to add undo/redo for the drops. Meantime, the radial menus are coming along nicely in the main branch (though I am locally developing in parallel in an add_radial_menus branch that I may publish).

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Sounds good. You may want to consider adding some form of enclosures to the quill files as from an end user perspective having a bunch of files for a single document is rather inconvenient. Another alternative is to use a simple zip based enclosure for the strokes file as well as any text and images, rather like the epub standard.

[Antonio Salazar (shadowfiend)]

Yes, the idea was to create a ZIP file. For the time being, however, I'm going to go the simpler route and create an images directory prefixed by the filename. I need to look into the ZIP-based (or even simply tar-based) handling a little more and figure out where to put what before implementing that.