Version 1.8.0

Information about GMAO - the application I (write and) use to translate manga.

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Version 1.8.0

Post by FuguTabetai »

New version of GMAO posted. Has some spiffy new animation to watch while you wait.

Has some excellent new effects for text. Well, just drop shadow really, but you can have as many as you want (it is slow though.)

Some bug fixes too.

A Mac .dmg version is forthcoming - as soon as my Mac comes back from the shop.
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Post by Onkr »

Hi,

I have been using GMAO for a long time now, as it is really unbeatable for fast good quality editing. I have thus two suggestions, nurtured by experience :-)

1) when drawing ellipses, it should be easier to point first one extremity of the ellipse then the second (i.e. one extremity of the great axe then one extremity of the small axe), rather than one "corner" then its diametrally opposed corner. Nearly each time I draw an ellipse, I have to move it after giving it the proper size, because pointing the first corner is very imprecise.

2) Most of the bubbles in the manga I translate are partial ellipses, i.e. ellipses "cut" by two of the borders of the image. I draw these using the polygon tool, but this requires quite a good deal of points. Hence it would be neat to have a new tool for "partial ellipses". It would work like this:

- first point is on the border of the image, where the ellipse is cut.
- second point is on the corner of the image.
- third point is on the other border of the image, where the ellipse is cut.
- fourth (and last) point is the center of the ellipse: third and first points are then joined by an ellipse arc (pointing positions on the ellipse itself would require two points, instead of just one when specifying the ellipse center).


Tell me what you think.
Keep on the good work :D

Onkr
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Wow, someone else uses GMAO

Post by FuguTabetai »

Hi Onkr, thank you for your suggestions.

I also use GMAO a lot, and know that partial ellipses are fairly common. One thing I would like to do is a more general approach to defining a bubble that uses addition and subtraction of regions. So I will think a bit about how to make a GUI for that, and represent it in the data.

Generally, the idea would be that you draw an ellipse, do something to indicate that you want to intersect or union another shape, and then draw another shape. Draw an ellipse, intersect with a rectangle, and you can easily get your partial ellipse. Union would be useful as well.

I didn't quite understand what you mean by your first point. You want to be able to specify ellipses in some other manner. So you click on the center, then the smaller axis, then the greater axis? I guess it isn't necessary to speficy the center because you can assume it will be where two lines (vertical for one, horizontal for the other) intersect.

I'll think about it. In general, I'm pretty busy, and would rather spend time translating with GMAO than programming on GMAO, but you do have two good points, and it is really nice to see that someone else uses GMAO.

The other thing I have been thinking of doing is using AWT to make File save / load dialogs so it uses the platform specific dialog (the Swing file dialog is really out of place on Mac OSX.)
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Post by Onkr »

Glad to see you plan to do something about this :D

About the way to draw an ellipse, sorry for not having been clear enough. Currently, you have to click on two diagonally opposite corners of the rectangle enclosing the ellipse. I suggest to click instead on two extremities of both ellipse axis, e.g. first on the topmost point of the ellipse, then on the rightmost point : this makes it easier to properly position the ellipse on the image.
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Post by FuguTabetai »

I've updated the Java Web Start version of GMAO to 1.8.1 which uses native file dialog boxes for some (only single file, not directory) file open / save choices, and implements Onkr's method for specify an oval when drawing.

I really should put some more work into it so that if you don't click top, left things don't go wonky, but for right now if you move the mouse the wrong way after clicking, it just gets really strange...

Onkr, please give me some feedback.
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Post by Onkr »

After some difficulties (not following the proper link on the Web page, because I forgot to "refresh" the home page, etc), I have finally been able to load version 1.8.1.

First feedback:

The loading/laying out of pages is much slower (although there is now some pretty fancy animation): about 5 or 6 seconds for complex pages. I hope this is just temporary because of traces/debug messages etc., and not the new standard behaviour.

Open/save with the native dialogs is nicer, that's a fact.

About ovals, I (personnally) find it easer, although the selection mechanism could be given some more "intelligence" : one should be allowed to click first either the top or the bottom, then either the left or the right. Of course, due to this, cliking e.g. first left then top would give the improper results.

I will try it a bit more and tell you about it.
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Post by FuguTabetai »

Onkr wrote: First feedback:

The loading/laying out of pages is much slower (although there is now some pretty fancy animation): about 5 or 6 seconds for complex pages. I hope this is just temporary because of traces/debug messages etc., and not the new standard behaviour.
Thanks for the feedback. The page layout itself has not changed, the code is the exact same. I did change the "Please wait..." modal dialog from a small floating window (that paused everything and didn't let you do anything) to an animated effect the grays out the entire screen. I have not noticed it slowing things down at all, but if you are on an older machine maybe it would slow things down. I can look into making that animated effect optional, but I really like it. :)

One thing that might make things slower is the new "Effects..." window for each bubble. The drop shadow effect is pretty slow, so if you have more than one of those, it will slow things down. The font outline is very fast though.
Onkr wrote: Open/save with the native dialogs is nicer, that's a fact.
It was surprisingly easy to make the change, and I really like it a lot more in Mac OSX now too. I haven't tried it on linux or windows yet (too busy to translate at all!) but it was pretty easy to switch over. The only place that uses Swing file dialogs is in the options settings, but since there is no way to select folders with native dialogs, I think those will stay.

I still need to add a "confirm" when you save over an old file, and I would like to check to make sure that the file you are saving is not much smaller than the one you are saving over. I've accidentally lost a few days worth of work that way before.
Onkr wrote: About ovals, I (personnally) find it easer, although the selection mechanism could be given some more "intelligence" : one should be allowed to click first either the top or the bottom, then either the left or the right. Of course, due to this, cliking e.g. first left then top would give the improper results.

I will try it a bit more and tell you about it.
Yes, I only had about 30 minutes to implement the new Oval drawing method and save dialogs, so it is rough. I expect that when I get a few spare minutes (maybe 15 or so) I can add code to make it work correctly for top / bottom or left / right.

I really would like to also implement a general method for Bubble Union and Intersection, but that will take a few hours of solid thought. I need to come up with a good UI first, implement better controls for visualizing the process and selecting bubbles, etc. Then I have to think about how to save the data structures in XML (that should be fairly easy) and how to save the data structures as Java objects (also, should be fairly easy.)

I'm really glad you are using GMAO though, so if you have any other requests, please let me know.

What OS are you running it on?
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Post by Onkr »

About the slowing down, I made the comparison with version 1.7.3 (not 1.8.0) on a Windows XP / 2.5 GHz computer. Not totally a low-end computer :wink:
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Post by FuguTabetai »

I've put up version 1.8.2 which does a better job of handling different click orders when drawing ovals. I'm not sure exactly what the most intuitive behavior would be, but playing with it a little you should find a comfortable way to use it for yourself.

I've also had a kind of fun time scripting the OSX DMG creation process, so that is automated now.

I would like to do some more GMAO coding, but I think I'll spend more time coding. I like this idea of doing arbitrary object intersection or union. I hope to code that up in a few months time, but who knows. My programming on GMAO is so flaky that I'm shocked the thing has come this far.

At least it works for what I need to do with it for now.

If anyone else out there has some requests, feel free to post them.
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Post by Onkr »

Regarding the union/intersections of objects, I have some suggestion, for what they are worth:

* use the same behavious as the Gimp for the man/machine interface:
- when pressing Shift, the cursor becomes a cross with a small '+', and creating new objects while Shift is pressed adds them to the previous object shape.
- also, when pressing Ctrl, the cursor becomes a cross with a small '-', and creating new objects while Ctrl is pressed subtract them from the previous object shape.
- when adding or subtracting objects, whatever the original shapes, they all become polygons after the operation. For this purpose, an oval is approximated with e.g. a 24-sided polygon.
- with this, no need to change the man-machine interface nor the Xml format.

* While I am at suggesting things, it would be nice...
- to add more than one page at a time, e.g. to add all the pages belonging to the same chapter in only one operation, with a file multi-select.
- if, when quitting and there is still unsaved data (a popup asks if I really want to quit), it does NOT quit if I click 'No'. :cry:
- if the color picker could be applied also to the background and outline colors, in addition to the text color.
- if the color chosers were re-initialised to the current color of the colored item, and not to the last value they had. For example, if I click on background to set its color to blue, then click on outline to set its color to red, then click again on background, the color choser is still red: I would like to find it blue.
- if the settings of GMAO could be saved into some kind of 'project' file, and in particular the path of the XML file, the path where to save the generated images, etc. This way, it would be simpler to swap from one translation project to the other.
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Post by FuguTabetai »

Onkr wrote: - when adding or subtracting objects, whatever the original shapes, they all become polygons after the operation. For this purpose, an oval is approximated with e.g. a 24-sided polygon.
- with this, no need to change the man-machine interface nor the Xml format.
I would prefer to keep information about the original shapes. It wouldn't be much more effort if I have to dig into the code anyway, and conceptually is much nicer. Of course, I've also said that it would pretty easy to add bezier curve support (or at least quadratic curves) to the polygons, but I never have gotten around to it.
Onkr wrote: - to add more than one page at a time, e.g. to add all the pages belonging to the same chapter in only one operation, with a file multi-select.
Since I always work on translations one page at a time in order, I've never really been bothered by this. I'll add it to the list though.
Onkr wrote: - if, when quitting and there is still unsaved data (a popup asks if I really want to quit), it does NOT quit if I click 'No'. :cry:

Hm, I've never actually checked to see if that prompt works correctly. I'll definitely add that to the list.
Onkr wrote: - if the color picker could be applied also to the background and outline colors, in addition to the text color.
It can. Click on the icon that shows the current colors. There are two boxes, one is for the text color, the other is for the background and outline color. Also, clicking outside of the boxes (on the part that changes color) sets the colors to Black / White, and clicking again makes them White / Black. I think.
Onkr wrote: - if the color chosers were re-initialised to the current color of the colored item, and not to the last value they had. For example, if I click on background to set its color to blue, then click on outline to set its color to red, then click again on background, the color choser is still red: I would like to find it blue.
The color choosing stuff is all a mess. I use a couple different color choosers, so you will notice that this behavior isn't even consistant. For the bubble colors though, this is something I should be able to do. I think; I don't know the color chooser API well.
Onkr wrote: - if the settings of GMAO could be saved into some kind of 'project' file, and in particular the path of the XML file, the path where to save the generated images, etc. This way, it would be simpler to swap from one translation project to the other.
Yes, I've been meaning to do this for a long time (since I translate many things at once.) As a work-around, check your home directory (or wherever it saves GMAO.props, should be in your home directory, probably C:/Documents and settings/Users/USER/ I think, it's been a while) and copy GMAO.props to project1.props. Do the same for project2.props, etc. Then name them GMAO.props when you want to edit a particular project.

It should be pretty easy to put a reference to a .props file in the XML file for a project. Then I just need to think of a way to make it easy to use.
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Post by FuguTabetai »

Onkr wrote:- if, when quitting and there is still unsaved data (a popup asks if I really want to quit), it does NOT quit if I click 'No'. :cry:
That was broken, now it is fixed. I can't believe that I never ran into that problem myself - it would quit every time.

I probably won't push out an update immediately, since I might do something about that "projects" thing too.
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Post by Onkr »

- if the color picker could be applied also to the background and outline colors, in addition to the text color.


It can. Click on the icon that shows the current colors. There are two boxes, one is for the text color, the other is for the background and outline color. Also, clicking outside of the boxes (on the part that changes color) sets the colors to Black / White, and clicking again makes them White / Black. I think.
Yes, this is totally true :wink: I was thinking about something else, but got disturbed while editing this part, and forgot to adjust my wording :oops: . This is about the new "gradient" color choser: it would be nice if I could select the starting color with the color picker (e.g. as the foreground color), then the ending color with the color picker too (e.g. as the background color), rather than defining both colors with only the color choser dialogs.

Also, about the color picker, it would be nice to have two flavors of it: a "pixel-wide" color picker (what it currently does), and also a "small-region-wide" color picker: for the latter, it would select the mean color of a small area around the cursor. This would be useful for black/white mangas using "frames" for greyed zones: the mean grey value is given by the density of black points on a white area, making it difficult to get the mean grey color with only a "pixel-wide" color choser.
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Post by Onkr »

And yet another suggestion: being able to position precisely the cursor using the keyboard arrow keys, moving one pixel at a time. I sometime need this precision when I want to remove some sound effect.
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Post by FuguTabetai »

I just tracked down a "bug" that was affecting the Windows (but not linux or mac) version of GMAO. It was simple, the default new file references an external DTD definition on a server that does not exist anymore. I've changed GMAO to make new XML files with embedded DTDs so that shouldn't be a problem, but it might take a week or two before I can find the time to get an updated GMAO up on the web. I had to do the development on my windows machine, and I don't have my build environment set up nicely there yet.
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Post by FuguTabetai »

Onkr wrote:Hi,

I have been using GMAO for a long time now, as it is really unbeatable for fast good quality editing. I have thus two suggestions, nurtured by experience :-)

1) when drawing ellipses, it should be easier to point first one extremity of the ellipse then the second (i.e. one extremity of the great axe then one extremity of the small axe), rather than one "corner" then its diametrally opposed corner. Nearly each time I draw an ellipse, I have to move it after giving it the proper size, because pointing the first corner is very imprecise.

2) Most of the bubbles in the manga I translate are partial ellipses, i.e. ellipses "cut" by two of the borders of the image. I draw these using the polygon tool, but this requires quite a good deal of points. Hence it would be neat to have a new tool for "partial ellipses". It would work like this:

- first point is on the border of the image, where the ellipse is cut.
- second point is on the corner of the image.
- third point is on the other border of the image, where the ellipse is cut.
- fourth (and last) point is the center of the ellipse: third and first points are then joined by an ellipse arc (pointing positions on the ellipse itself would require two points, instead of just one when specifying the ellipse center).


Tell me what you think.
Keep on the good work :D

Onkr
Hi Onkr, your point 1 I implemented a while ago, and I do think that method of drawing is a bit easier. I still end up moving the ellipse around a bit after I'm done though. With the drag and control point reshaping I introduced, this tends to be pretty easy now though.

As for point 2, the new release (1.9.0) addresses that. Here's my suggestion: draw your oval, then use the polygon to mask off the parts of the oval you don't want (use the intersect function.)

You can draw the mask right on top of the oval, but then you can't just drag it - I don't know why. I had to use the hand tool to move it away, then drag it back to intersect it (worked great like that though.) I think there are some problems using the hand tool to move things because it breaks the keyboard modifiers for some reason, but I'll just work around that for now. If it bothers me enough I'll try to fix it.
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