Wishlist Item : dialog to prevent combining too much primitives in a single SVG effect filter

[ivan louette]

At the moment in 0.46 devel if you apply a new SVG effect filter to an already filtered object the second filter primitives are simply added to first's ones to generate a third filter.

If that's a very interesting behaviour for those who create new filters, that could drive new and unexperimented users to create too complex and unmanageable filters. On the other hand that's not an encouragement to generate clean and lightweight svg filters code.

Here is my proposal to solve this problem without removing todays very interesting feature :

- at first time you apply a filter to an object it's normally applied like now ;

- if you try to apply a second filter to an already filtered selection a dialog appears whith two possibilities : "Add new" or "Combine". If you click on "Add new", a new group is automatically created which includes the selection, and the new filter is applied to the group. If you click on "Combine", the two filters are combined like this is the case today.

I experimented that grouping is an excellent solution for managing multiple filters on the same object or inside overlaid groups. That allows to select groups or individual objects in the XML Editor and modify, remove or replace any filter separately. That gives also a clean overview of used filters in the Objects/Filters dialog.

ivan

[ivan louette (ivan-louette)]

An alternative to my previous proposals could be placing the choice between "Add new" or "Combine" in Inkscape/Preferences. Then I suggest "Add new" as the default behaviour.