Hello there,

I'm a cotidian user of Karbon14. I love it. But I have some thoughts about it. I'm too lazy to submit bugs for all of these things.

I feel Karbon is the less mantained app in Calligra. Many features and bug requests were kept from some years ago, while Krita and another Calligra apps are growing up so fast. Pity for that, 'cause we have to recognize that it's a great app to create/edit vectors.

I used Inkscape a lot, as much as I use Karbon. I love the way Inkscape handles nodes and do boolean operations. But I hate the way Karbon do them: if you draw two concentric circles, and do the substract/exclude operation (Path->Exclude paths, Path->Substract paths, I think this is the translation in english) you will notice that the number of nodes will increase: not four nodes for a circle, but a very large number of rect nodes that are drawing a polygon, not a circumference. This happens every time you do boolean operations between paths with curved nodes.

Another very big issue (for me) is that Karbon turns slower when zoom value is "high" (let's say > 500%). I know that in Inkscape happens the same, but in Karbon's case, the app turns so slow.

And there's a lack of a plugin or something to trace bitmaps, like Inkscape has (with the help of Potrace).

And there are some things that, I think, are very important for the development of Karbon: for example, there's no way to set a different opacity for a stop in a gradient. You have to set the opacity for the whole gradient, or nothing. Or now, with the release of the first beta of Calligra, the size of a duplicated path is not the same of the original path. Or, if you delete all text in a "artistic text" shape, Karbon crashes.

But not all is bad in Karbon. It's fast, friendly and intuitive. It's great for begginers and for experts. I do all my vector drawings in Karbon; I'm doing a redesign of some icons from Faenza to make a decent port for KDE, in Karbon. But things would be more faster and better without these troubles.

I know I'm not the only user of Karbon. Calligra developers have forgotten Karbon? Hope they don't. I trust in a bright future of Karbon and Calligra.

Karbon was without a maintainer for a while, which I'm sure really slowed things down. Fortunately it's been picked up by one lone dev, who is now fighting the good fight, solo. I use Karbon, too and agree, it's a really nice, lightweight, easy to use vector editor, which misses some things, but also has others that Inkscape still doesn't have.

It's worth remembering, too that Krita's vector tools pretty much come straight from Karbon, so when Karbon improves all Caligra apps benefit.

Anyway, at this stage, with this number of developers, I'd say they really just need to focus on the features / fixes that are likely to affect every single user right now. Things like your speed when zooming and gradient stop transparency seem like good candidates to me. As much as I love things like potrace and booleans, I'd say put them down on a roadmap, but wait until the core speed and features are rock solid.

acidrums4 wrote:I feel Karbon is the less mantained app in Calligra. Many features and bug requests were kept from some years ago, while Krita and another Calligra apps are growing up so fast. Pity for that, 'cause we have to recognize that it's a great app to create/edit vectors.

Thanks for your kind words, that is really appreciated. Unfortunately as Kubuntiac already mentioned, I am the only one working on Karbon, and in my spare time. So there are only small steps I can take at a time.

acidrums4 wrote:I used Inkscape a lot, as much as I use Karbon. I love the way Inkscape handles nodes and do boolean operations. But I hate the way Karbon do them: if you draw two concentric circles, and do the substract/exclude operation (Path->Exclude paths, Path->Substract paths, I think this is the translation in english) you will notice that the number of nodes will increase: not four nodes for a circle, but a very large number of rect nodes that are drawing a polygon, not a circumference. This happens every time you do boolean operations between paths with curved nodes.

I am using the functionality from the Qt toolkit to do boolean operations. So there is not much I can do about that.

acidrums4 wrote:Another very big issue (for me) is that Karbon turns slower when zoom value is "high" (let's say > 500%). I know that in Inkscape happens the same, but in Karbon's case, the app turns so slow.

That can probably improved, but I think there are more important things to fix first. As pointed out above, I can only work at one thing at a time.

acidrums4 wrote:And there's a lack of a plugin or something to trace bitmaps, like Inkscape has (with the help of Potrace).

There is already a feature wish for that in bugzilla. So it will probably be added at some point in the future.

acidrums4 wrote:And there are some things that, I think, are very important for the development of Karbon: for example, there's no way to set a different opacity for a stop in a gradient.

That is already working since ages. If you edit a shape with a gradient with the gradient tool, you can select a single gradient stop by clicking on it directly on canvas. In the gradient tool option widget there is a small color popup with the label stop color. In there you can change the color of the selected color stop as well as the opacity of the color stop.

acidrums4 wrote:Or, if you delete all text in a "artistic text" shape, Karbon crashes.

That crash is already fixed. The next snapshot release should include that bugfix.

So to summarize, no Karbon is not forgotten or dead, but it is only moving slowly forward.

That is already working since ages. If you edit a shape with a gradient with the gradient tool, you can select a single gradient stop by clicking on it directly on canvas. In the gradient tool option widget there is a small color popup with the label stop color. In there you can change the color of the selected color stop as well as the opacity of the color stop.

Then I should be the only that can't get it. If I'm not wrong, the "small color popup with the label stop color" you're talking about is this:



Maybe you are refering to that little triangles with the stop color. Nor the scroll for general opacity, 'cause it changes the opacity of the whole gradient. But when I click a triangle in this widget, I get a dialog like the following:



And I get a traditional KDE Color selection dialog. As you can see, there's no way there to select opacity. I supossed that clicking the color rectangle at the left of the HTML Hex code of the color ('cause when I opened a SVG or something with a gradient with opacity, this square shows the opacity of the color stop), but nothing happens. I've seen the same on previous versions of Karbon.

Anyway, I still think that it's a pity that only you are working on the developing of Karbon. It's not fair that Krita has so many developers, and Karbon only one. Calligra could get very powerful if some people could help you in this matter. But it's my opinion...

No I was talking about the following:
1. Select a shape with a gradient.
2. Activate the gradient tool.
3. Click on one of the color stops on the canvas like in the following image (the selected color stop has a diamond shape)

4. Click on the color chooser popup as highlighted in the following image:

5. Change the opacity as you like.
6. Be happy

jaham wrote:6. Be happy

\o/