A straight Knife cut now starts only when Alt is held at the press.
Alt pressed later in the drag, even before the pointer moves, leaves
the cut freehand. Releasing Alt during a straight cut keeps it
straight.
With Shift+Alt, the cut keeps to 45° steps from the horizontal and
vertical whatever the Constrain Angle. The Pencil's straight line
still steps from the Constrain Angle.
Tests cover Alt after the press, Alt only at the release, a 90° cut,
a 30° Constrain Angle, and the cut boundaries in the engine.
Docs: docs/target-app-parity.md.
The Knife cut along the freehand drag whatever keys were held. The
reference app cuts in a straight line with Alt-drag, and it cuts at 45
or 90 degrees with Shift+Alt-drag.
With Alt held at the press, or pressed before the drag has moved, the
Knife's stroke is the press point and the pointer: the dashed line
shows it while dragging, and the release sends path.knife with those
two points. With Shift held too, the line keeps to 45° steps from the
Constrain Angle, as the Pencil's Shift line does. Shift is read on each
drag event and at the release. The cut stays straight when Alt is let
go, a line taken back to its press point sends no command, and Shift
alone leaves the cut freehand.
Docs: docs/target-app-parity.md.
paint.invert and paint.complement on the Fill proxy, the Edit Colors
commands, the Blend commands and recolor.apply now recolor the color
that colorizes a grayscale or 1-bit image, as one undo step with the
other targets. Before, they left it unchanged. Expand Appearance and
Object > Expand bake color adjustment effects into that color too.
- A colorized image's pixels are not recolored; they stay the gray
coverage of its color. A stroke-only pass reaches the image's stroke
items and leaves its colorize color unchanged.
- A command that would leave a process color on a grayscale image with
an alpha channel fails with the existing message and changes nothing.
Object > Expand undoes its earlier steps when that happens.
- A colorized image counts as a filled object in a blend.
Alt in a spiral drag now rounds the fitted segment count to whole winds
of four segments, counted from the segment count when Alt went down.
Ctrl/Cmd takes precedence when both keys are held, and switching back to
Alt starts from the current count with the held inner end kept. Arrow
keys, Escape, release and a new drag clear the held Alt count.
Tests cover both keys together, a switch mid-drag, Escape, the 2 to 1000
bounds and the committed path's anchor count. docs/mcp.md and
docs/target-app-parity.md describe the rule.
The reference app adds or subtracts winds from a spiral with Alt-drag
and changes its decay rate with Ctrl/Cmd-drag. VectorCraft's Spiral
tool did nothing with either key during a drag.
While a spiral is dragged out, Alt or Ctrl/Cmd keeps the spiral's
inner end at the distance from the center it had when the key went
down, and the outer end follows the pointer. With Alt the number of
segments changes to the nearest whole number that fits, within 2 to
1000, so dragging outward adds segments and dragging inward removes
them. With Ctrl/Cmd the decay changes to fit, within 5 to 99.99
percent, the decays a spiral is drawn with. When both keys are held,
Ctrl/Cmd changes the decay. Up/Down with a key still held move the
held radius to the new segment count. The new values stay when the
key is let go, and as the Spiral tool's segments and decay options
for the next spiral. Both keys also work with a 5 percent decay and
hundreds of segments.
Docs: docs/mcp.md, docs/target-app-parity.md.
Effect › Color Effects › Vector Halftone… (addon.color.halftone, also in
Object › Plug-ins › Color Effects) draws its object as the halftone dots
Object › Vector Halftone makes, live: mono (one dot colour, or each dot in
the art's colour under it) or CMYK screens, the five dot shapes,
frequency, angle, invert and clip to the art's outline.
- The screens, dots and caps move to vectorcraft_effects::addons::halftone,
shared by the command (its behaviour and tests unchanged) and the effect.
- The renderer samples the art (vectorcraft_render::addons::halftone) and
keeps the dots by the object's content and what it reads from the
document, so unchanged art isn't sampled again; past 100000 cells per
screen the object draws as it is.
- Expand Appearance turns the object into its dots, and the SVG, PDF, EPS
and AI exporters write them as paths.
- Its dialog reuses the command's fields, without Keep Original.
Deferred: stochastic and radial patterns, a dot-gain curve, per-screen
separation settings, type or symbols as dots.
Path Precision Tools gains the Parametric Shape Tool: ten kinds of shape
(rectangle, ellipse, polygon, star, ring, arrow, cross, heart, gear,
speech bubble) that stay editable as numbers.
- Geometry in vectorcraft_pathops::addons::pathtools::shapes: each kind's
outline, corner rounding limited to the middle of a side, a fingerprint
of the outline, recovery of centre, size and rotation after a move,
turn or scale, and recognition of plain rectangles, ellipses and
regular polygons.
- The tool (parametricShape, All Tools drawer and Object › Plug-ins ›
Path Precision Tools only, no shortcut): drag from the centre (Shift:
45° steps), arrow keys change the count and values while dragging,
handles edit a selected shape, double-click places one.
- Commands addon.pathtools.shape.create / .set / .convert, one undo step
each; params checked (counts 3..1000, sizes up to 16384 pt).
- A shape keeps its numbers in one object-data entry (vc-pathtools-shape)
that SVG export already leaves out; anchor edits make it a plain path.
- Parametric Shape panel, cursor stand-in, catalog rows in all 25
languages, docs and tests.
Art dragged off the canvas and colours dragged in from elsewhere (swatches, another library's)
used to be added at the end of the ungrouped items, wherever they were dropped. They now land
as items dragged within the list do: on another item of their kind, just before or after it by
the pointer's half and in its group; on a group, into it; away from the items, ungrouped at the
end as before.
library.add takes group and before/after, placed as library.moveItem places an item (the
placement is shared). A library change that fails partway now leaves the library as it was.
People reuse the same gradients across documents and rebuilt them by
hand. The Gradient panel now has a Presets menu: the presets of the
app's built-in gradient libraries, grouped by library (theme), then
the saved ones. Choosing one gives the gradient behind the active
proxy (or a solid paint) the preset's type, stops, method and dither,
keeping its placement, as one undo step, through paint.editGradient.
The panel menu saves the current gradient as a preset (named in a
dialog) and deletes saved ones; Hide/Show Presets toggles the row.
Saved presets are kept with the preferences, next to the other user
preset lists (width profiles, flattener, perspective). Stops linked to
a document swatch keep their colour, unlinked, since a preset is used
in other documents. Built-in presets can't be deleted; names are
unique.
Commands: gradient.presets.list, .apply, .save and .delete. The menu's
rows are drawn only while in view, as its headings are.
Tests: engine tests for list, apply (fill and stroke, placement kept,
one undo step), save (unique names, unlinked swatch stops) and delete;
panel tests for applying from the menu and saving, deleting and
hiding presets from the panel menu, including scrolling the menu to
the saved presets. Docs: gaps G13, target-app and UI parity, ROADMAP.
Patch and triangle mesh shadings of more than 4,096 patches, and strokes
painted with a mesh shading, came in as a flat grey. Illustrator writes
meshes of up to 14,355 patches, and writes a freeform gradient on a
stroke as a stroke painted with a type 7 shading.
- MAX_PATCHES is 16,384, as in the .ai editing-data reader.
- A stroke painted with a mesh shading is the meshes clipped to the area
the stroke paints (stroke_outline: width, caps, joins, miter limit and
dashes, built in the path's space and then transformed); draw_meshes
always clips a stroke's meshes.
Two follow-ups to the empty-page fallback:
- A page counts as empty only when nothing on it was skipped: its only
notes are the page's own (art off the artboards, art past the page). A
page whose only content couldn't be read, such as an image that can't
be decoded, keeps its notes and goes through the usual check against
the editing data, instead of being replaced by it unchecked.
- With textAs: outlines, the document read from the editing data alone
has its type outlined. The usual path takes outlines from the page,
but an empty page (or a text-only placeholder, #1387) has none to give.
A mesh in the editing data that the reader couldn't read made the whole
file come in as its page or PDF part, without its layers. Three cases
were rejected that files write routinely:
- A mesh starts grey, and `/CS` is written only where the colour space
changes, before the corner it applies to, even within a patch. Meshes
with no `/CS`, or one that changed between corners, were unread.
- Named colours (`[c m y k /DeviceCMYK (name) /Process]` or `/Spot`) and
`/NChannel` inks: each corner gives the tint, 1 being the full colour.
- Grids over 64 patches a side or 4,096 patches (files have 97 x 72).
Each corner now takes the colour space last set before it; named
colours paint at their tint and inks overprint at theirs; the limits
are 128 a side and 16,384 patches.
smithay-clipboard's load() waits for the selection owner's data with no limit, and
Paste and the "is the clipboard still ours" check read on the UI thread, so an owner
that never sends its data froze the window. Reads now run on a worker thread with a
second clipboard on the window's connection and are waited for 2 s at most. While a
read that timed out is unanswered, later reads return at once instead of queueing
behind it, and its late answer is dropped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Where arboard can't open (GNOME has no data-control protocol, and the Flatpak on a
Wayland session has no X11), Copy and Paste use the compositor's core data-device
protocol on the window's own connection through smithay-clipboard, already in the
build through egui-winit: text only, a copy's text or its SVG markup. A bitmap-only
copy reports that this clipboard carries text only and leaves it as it was.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
In effect dialogs (like Color Halftone), length fields with defined bounds
(e.g. Max Radius 4..127 pt) were previously checked only after num_field
returned, leaving the field's temporary buffer holding the un-clamped string
(e.g. '0.5 px'). Subsequently entering invalid text caused the field to
fall back to that sub-minimum buffer.
- Added num_field_within to pass effect parameter bounds directly to unit_field.
- When committed, clamp the parsed value within bounds and update the field
buffer to the formatted clamped value so the UI reflects what is applied.
- When invalid text is committed, clear the invalid buffer and trigger a
one-frame border highlight so invalid input is rejected visibly.
A built-in add-on under Object › Plug-ins › Smart Pen:
- The Smart Pen Tool draws and edits Bézier paths without switching
tools: a click adds the next segment straight or curved (a panel
toggle; Tab flips the segment being placed or the last one), a drag
makes a smooth point (Alt breaks the handle, Shift snaps to 45°, Space
moves the point), a curve after a straight segment joins it tangent.
- On existing paths it selects and moves points, removes a point keeping
the shape (Alt-click), toggles smooth/corner (double-click), drags
handles, reshapes a segment by dragging it and inserts a point on it
(Alt-click); it closes, continues and joins open paths.
- The Smart Pen panel: next segment straight or curved, remove points
keeping shape, make smooth, make corner, retract handles, close or
join.
The tool stays out of both toolbars as shipped; the All Tools drawer
lists it under the add-on's heading. Commands are addon.pen.*; the
existing Pen tool, commands and menus are unchanged.
A built-in add-on under Object › Plug-ins › Path Precision Tools:
- Anchor Eraser Brush: painting over selected paths removes the anchors
under the brush that the outline can do without within a tolerance,
refitting the handles beside them (Alt ignores the tolerance, Cmd/Ctrl
deletes without refitting, pen pressure can scale the brush); one undo
step per stroke.
- Extend Path tool: dragging an end of an open path carries it on
straight, by stretching its last curve or along the circle it curves
on, or shortens it back along itself.
- Measure & Inspect tool: drag to measure distance and angle; hover a
path to read segment and path length, area, curvature, tangent and
anchor angles and handles, in the document's units.
- Anchor Inspector panel: the selected anchor's position and handles as
numbers, with Make Smooth (auto-smooth rule), Make Corner, Equalize
Handles, Remove Points Keep Shape, Add Points and three ways to close.
- Add Points at Crossings and Split at Crossings.
The tools stay out of both toolbars as shipped; the All Tools drawer
lists them under the add-on's heading. Commands are addon.pathtools.*;
the existing commands, tools and menus are unchanged.
A built-in add-on in Effect › Color Effects and Object › Plug-ins › Color Effects:
- Exposure (stops of linear light, offset and gamma), Desaturate and
Invert Colors as live colour adjustments, evaluated in stack order with
those of Effect › Color Adjustments.
- addon.color.filter applies any colour adjustment to the colours
themselves, through the Edit Colors pass, as one undo step.
- A panel picks an adjustment and its values, then adds it as a live
effect or applies it as a filter.
The add-on lives in its own modules (effects, engine and ui-egui addons
folders) and leaves the existing effects, commands and menus as they
were.
A built-in add-on under Object › Plug-ins › Artwork Cleanup:
- Simplify Anchors (Keep Shape) removes anchors while the outline stays
within a tolerance, optionally keeping sharp corners.
- Document Health Check finds and fixes 16 kinds of problems in the
selection or the document (stray points, duplicate and collinear
anchors, tiny handles, nearly closed paths, needless groups, compound
paths and clipping groups, unpainted and invisible objects, duplicate
objects, art off every artboard, empty artboards…), with Show, Fix
Selected and Fix All, each fix one undo step.
- Deep Ungroup and Rejoin Path Pieces.
The add-on lives in its own modules (pathops, engine and ui-egui
addons folders) and leaves the existing commands, tools and menus as
they were.
A placed (linked) file is put where its matrix takes the canvas point of
art space's origin (the centre of %AI3_TemplateBox). In many files the
matrix takes the corner of the box the file is written with instead, so
the image landed far off its artboard, the layers differed from the
page, and the file came in as its PDF part.
The reader keeps that second placement for each placed file where the
two differ. When the layers don't draw as the page, they are compared
again with those files at their box's corner, and used if that draws
as the page. Files whose layers already match keep their placement.
A placed (linked) file written as an object's editable copy, on %_
lines after its drawn look, has its %AI5_BeginPlace and %AI5_EndPlace
markers on those lines too. The lexer dropped comments after %_ that
don't start a section, so the placed file never began, the ~ that ends
it was an operator the reader didn't know, and the whole file came in
as its PDF part. The lexer now returns those two markers from %_ lines,
and the preview reader skips the %_ its header line starts with.
PDF export (and the PDF-compatible .ai it writes) cut each gradient mesh
patch into 8 x 8 flat-coloured quads. Viewers showed colour bands and
hairline seams between them, and files with many meshes became very
large and slow to write.
An opaque mesh is now written as one Type 6 (Coons patch) shading
(ISO 32000-1, 8.7.4.5.7) filling its outline, through the PDF writer's
MeshGradient: each patch blends its corner colours bilinearly, as the
canvas draws it. Colours go through page_color as other fills do, and a
mesh mixing RGB with other models goes through RGB. A mesh with
see-through points, an invalid one, or one past the coordinate range
keeps the quads.
A PDF-compatible .ai whose PDF part's pages are cropped to its art (each
page the box of all the art, the editing data's bounding box) rather
than to its artboards came in as that PDF part: the editing data's
artboard wasn't the page's size, so its layers were refused. With
several artboards every page held all the art, so the document had a
copy of everything per page.
When the artboard isn't the page's size but the editing data's bounding
box is, the layers are compared with the page on that box and keep
their artboards. The comparison of their art with the page still
decides whether they are used.
With Preferences > Performance > Real-time Drawing and Editing off, tool
previews are deferred to the release, so a guide dragged out of a ruler
(guide.add) or moved with a selection tool (guide.move) showed only its
position label until the button was released. Guide previews now always
apply as the guide is dragged: the guide is all such a drag shows.
#4646's units and guides lost on reopen don't reproduce for a native
file: a new millimetre document's ruler guides and units survive Save,
Close and Open in .vectorcraft, PDF, .ai and EPS (new regression test,
and live in the app with Background Save). An SVG saved without Preserve
Editing reopens in pixels with no guides, as the reporter saw.
A pattern fill was written to EMF as every tile's art, each tile in a clip
of its own, with the brush made again for each part: a rotated two-colour
stripe fill of a 360 x 260 pt rectangle took 473 fills, 246 clips and
122 KB.
When the tiles can't overlap (a grid or brick tiling whose art stays in its
tile), each tile's clip is left out where what it clips lies inside it
already (a convex clip holding every control point of the fills), and the
n-th fill of every tile becomes one path. The picture is the same: the
tiles don't overlap, and the fill's own clip still trims them. That fill
is now 2 fills and 1 clip, 61 KB; unrotated, 99 KB becomes 33 KB.
Tiles that overlap, hex tilings, and tiles holding strokes, images or
clips that cut are written as before, their parts off the page left out.
bflatastic