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.
Every Preferences dialog option is read by shipped code, by its field or
its key, except five, each waiting on a subsystem of its own: Open
Documents As Tabs (documents in floating windows, G7), Units > East Asian
Type, Hyphenation > Default Language, Scratch Disks, and the legacy vector
clipboard. Highlight Alternate Glyphs, Real-time Drawing and the Devices
options, still listed as stored-only, act. Docs only.
A layered .ai or Illustrator EPS whose editing data (embedded rasters,
mostly) unpacks past 512 MiB opened as its PDF part or printed page, in
one layer, with "it decompresses to more than 512 MB" (#4628 on 0.17.0
hit the older 256 MiB limit the same way).
The limit is now an eighth of installed memory, from 512 MiB (what every
64-bit build read before) to 2 GiB: 1 GiB on an 8 GiB machine, 2 GiB on
16 GiB or more. Reading takes about as much memory again as the data
(1.1 GB of data with 24 embedded 4096 x 4096 images peaked 1.1 GB above
the start), so the ceiling keeps a small file that unpacks without end
from taking a large machine's memory. 32-bit and web builds keep 256 MiB.
vectorcraft_render::installed_memory exposes the reading the image cache
already sizes itself from.
Two ways the next launch came back with settings from before:
- The workspace, panels, toolbars and other settings kept only in the UI
state were written only on quitting (Preferences OK already saved at
once, #1747). A session ended any other way lost them. The app now
saves within 2 seconds of a change, and only when something changed.
- Each launch is its own process, so two windows are common (opening a
second file from the file manager). A window wrote back the whole
state it started from when it quit, so the one quitting last put back
the settings it read at its start, even with nothing changed in it.
A window now saves only what it changed since it last read or saved,
merged into the file as it is: each UI field, and each engine
preference on its own. A setting both windows changed takes the last
save.
The status line, open dialog and other fields a start resets neither
trigger a save nor replace another window's.
With the Direct Selection tool active (after the bar's Edit Path, or
switching to it) and a path selected whole, the Contextual Task Bar kept
the Selection tool's Edit Path, Offset Path and Simplify: its anchor
actions showed only for anchors picked out one by one.
The public overview lists, for a path the Direct Selection tool selects,
Simplify and the anchor actions. A path selected whole now offers Corner
and Smooth (path.convertAnchors converts every anchor of a fully
selected path), Connect for an open path, and Simplify. Remove Anchor
Points and Cut Path need anchors picked out and still wait for them.
Edit Path, which only switches to the tool already in use, is left out,
for compound paths too.
Art dragged off the canvas reached the panels (Asset Export, Graphic
Styles, Swatches, Symbols) only from the Selection tool: drag_art_out
checked for that tool by id. With the Direct Selection or Group
Selection tool the move stayed on the canvas, so nothing dropped.
Those tools now hand over a move too when every selected object is
selected whole (a press on its fill). A drag of anchor points or
segments, which they also call Move, stays a reshape and isn't handed
to the panels.
Dan Green