Comments on GMAO

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

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dDave
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Comments on GMAO

Post by dDave »

Howdy,

I have used GMAO to mark up a chapter, and here are some things that come to mind:

* I really want more control over the placement of text in a bubble.
* The annotation window should be accessible via a button on the right of the zoom drop down. It's a major tool, and needs a button as well.
* The new page button could use a button too.
* The language field in the annotation box should have a pref to auto-fill with the last last language used. I only input English, and it's a hassle to enter the language every panel.
* If you enter a break/carriage return in the annotation panel, it should show up in the text balloon.
* When you start up the program, you should be automatically greeted with the login box. If logging in is the first thing you must do, then make it easy on us.
* When you click the "move" button, the button highlights, then the highlight moves over to the "erase" button. The move tool functions, but the indicator shows that the erase tool.
* If you select the "erase" tool, the "hide bubbles" button highlights instead.
* It would be nice to have a pref to have a new annotation window pop up as soon as you finish drawing a balloon.
* Autosave after 5 minutes.
* When you double-click on a balloon in the tree, that text should come up in a edit annotation window.
* The ultimate in bubble control would be the ability to select a bubble already laid down and adjust the size like a polygon selection in a illustrator/freehand, with the text auto-sizing dynamically to fit.
* Have a option to draw the bubble shapes with a border.
* When you hit the close box, you get a dialog that say "you have not saved, do you want to continue?" If you click "no" it still closes the file.
* I would like to be able to bold a single word in a text block.
* It would be nice to top, center and bottom justify the text in the balloon.
* It would be nice to have a tool to just white out area without the text association. It would need a different color in the GMAO window, of course.
* How does the text wrapping work? I can't figure it out.
* When exporting to a page range, make the upper default the last page number.

I'm sure I'll find more as I continue to use the program, but this is enough for now.

I've gotta say that problems aside, GMAO is a great program. It's fast and relatively easy to use. The output options are great. I love the javascript option. The ability to set different fonts for different characters is cool. I have several SFX "characters" set up, with different fonts.

Best,

Dave
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Re: Comments on GMAO

Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote:Howdy,

I have used GMAO to mark up a chapter, and here are some things that come to mind:

* I really want more control over the placement of text in a bubble.
What are you looking for? Right now you can do this:
Horizontally justify left, center, or right.
Vertically justify top, center, or bottom.
dDave wrote: * The annotation window should be accessible via a button on the right of the zoom drop down. It's a major tool, and needs a button as well.
The annotation window is pointless unless you input more than one language. Here is why: all the functions it has are accessbile via the keyboard (New Translation, Edit Translation.) When you move the mouse over a bubble, character information and the text goes down in the status line. You do need the annotation window to check out annotations other than the primary display language / annotator though. I personally never have the thing visible except under rare circumstances.

I totally should remove the zoom drop-down because that code is so buggy.
dDave wrote: * The new page button could use a button too.
Hm, a new page is a rare operation compared to the bubble drawing tools. So I never thought to put it on the toolbar.
dDave wrote: * The language field in the annotation box should have a pref to auto-fill with the last last language used. I only input English, and it's a hassle to enter the language every panel.

There is actually code in GMAO to set up defaults - I just don't have an interface to let a user enable it. I'll look into that.
dDave wrote: * If you enter a break/carriage return in the annotation panel, it should show up in the text balloon.
Like HTML, returns and carriage returns are ignored in the text bubbles. But you can enter a <BR> (be sure to have a space on either end of it) and that will do what you want. That is the only character level control code that exists in GMAO.
dDave wrote: * When you start up the program, you should be automatically greeted with the login box. If logging in is the first thing you must do, then make it easy on us.
There are a few things you can do without logging in (generate character lists, make a new file, ...) But in general, you are right. This is a good suggestion for an option.
dDave wrote: * When you click the "move" button, the button highlights, then the highlight moves over to the "erase" button. The move tool functions, but the indicator shows that the erase tool.
* If you select the "erase" tool, the "hide bubbles" button highlights instead.
I'll look into that. I don't see that happening when I use GMAO, but since I wrote the button highlighting code myself, it is possible.
dDave wrote: * It would be nice to have a pref to have a new annotation window pop up as soon as you finish drawing a balloon.
You mean when you finish drawing a bubble, it immediately pops up the dialouge to edit a new translation? Hm. I don't even know if that would be easy or hard to do.
dDave wrote: * Autosave after 5 minutes.
I should be able to add that easily enough. Do you still have big instability problems?
dDave wrote: * When you double-click on a balloon in the tree, that text should come up in a edit annotation window.
Probably. I've only used the tree for page navigation at all. That should be easy enough to do though.
dDave wrote: * The ultimate in bubble control would be the ability to select a bubble already laid down and adjust the size like a polygon selection in a illustrator/freehand, with the text auto-sizing dynamically to fit.
That is unlikely to happen because it would be a real pain to come up with a decent point modification UI. Well, I know what a good one would look like, it would just be a lot of work to implement.
dDave wrote: * Have a option to draw the bubble shapes with a border.
Already exists. Check the GMAO->Options->Appearance panel, the Annotation Outline color (normally white) and Annotation Outline Thickness (as well as Draw Annotation outlines.)
dDave wrote: * When you hit the close box, you get a dialog that say "you have not saved, do you want to continue?" If you click "no" it still closes the file.
I'll have to check this - I've used the no before and it has saved me...
dDave wrote: * I would like to be able to bold a single word in a text block.
That won't happen unless I re-write the text handling to use the TextLayout class (which won't happen unless I extend it to make it a bit more fancy for what I need to do.)
dDave wrote: * It would be nice to top, center and bottom justify the text in the balloon.
You can do that already. Right click on a bubble, check out the justification options. I have no idea if it is even possible to change the default Center / Center justification for new bubbles, but vertical justification other than Center hasn't been as well tested. I should really put in code to do a better job at determining what the "bottom" of a bubble is for example.
dDave wrote: * It would be nice to have a tool to just white out area without the text association. It would need a different color in the GMAO window, of course.
Er, I don't see how this would be better than just drawing a bubble without putting a translation with it.
dDave wrote: * How does the text wrapping work? I can't figure it out.
GMAO breaks text on white space (spaces, returns, tabs, etc.) and then starts with the first word, and places it on a line. It keeps adding words to that line until the line goes outside of the bubble. Removes the word that caused it to go out of bounds, and then starts a new line. That moves the old line up or down depending on the justification options. The process continues until all words are placed. For the font sizing, it does all that starting at the smallest font size up until it either the text doesn't all fit, or it hits the max font size (which is a user option, as is the min font size.)
dDave wrote: * When exporting to a page range, make the upper default the last page number.
The start should be the last page number?
dDave wrote: I'm sure I'll find more as I continue to use the program, but this is enough for now.

I've gotta say that problems aside, GMAO is a great program. It's fast and relatively easy to use. The output options are great. I love the javascript option. The ability to set different fonts for different characters is cool. I have several SFX "characters" set up, with different fonts.

Best,

Dave
glad that someone else finds GMAO useful. It is really written only for me, but since it is open source, anyone is free to take it and improve on it, and I'm glad some people can even just use it.

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Re: Comments on GMAO

Post by dDave »

Howdy,
FuguTabetai wrote: What are you looking for? Right now you can do this:
Horizontally justify left, center, or right.
Vertically justify top, center, or bottom.
I can't find this functionality. I take it from comments further down that some of it is available through a right click context menu, but I don't get any response when I right click. I wonder if it's part of the same problem with the lack of cut and paste.
FuguTabetai wrote: The annotation window is pointless unless you input more than one language. Here is why: all the functions it has are accessbile via the keyboard (New Translation, Edit Translation.) When you move the mouse over a bubble, character information and the text goes down in the status line. You do need the annotation window to check out annotations other than the primary display language / annotator though. I personally never have the thing visible except under rare circumstances.
So, if I understand you correctly, you draw a bubble, position the mouse over the bubble and press control-n to get the new note input window. The control key functions work on the Mac, but oddly enough, the hide/show bubble function is mapped to option-b key combo. I wonder how that happened as the PC does not have an option key.
FuguTabetai wrote:Hm, a new page is a rare operation compared to the bubble drawing tools. So I never thought to put it on the toolbar.
Which I why I would advocate for auto page generation from all images in the directory.
FuguTabetai wrote: Like HTML, returns and carriage returns are ignored in the text bubbles. But you can enter a <BR>
Nice to know.
FuguTabetai wrote:Do you still have big instability problems?
Yes. At least a crash a night. I posted a crash log over in the other thread.
FuguTabetai wrote:> Have a option to draw the bubble shapes with a border.

Already exists. Check the GMAO->Options->Appearance panel, the Annotation Outline color (normally white) and Annotation Outline Thickness (as well as Draw Annotation outlines.)
Would it be possible to have a button to toggle the outline? That would give quick access to the feature. I would set the outline color to be black, but keep it off until I needed a bounded bubble/box.
FuguTabetai wrote:Right click on a bubble, check out the justification options.
I receive no response to a right click. And yes, I have a two button mouse on my Mac, and OS X has support for two button mice :)
FuguTabetai wrote: >It would be nice to have a tool to just white out area without the text association. It would need a different color in the GMAO window, of course.

Er, I don't see how this would be better than just drawing a bubble without putting a translation with it.
In certain panels I need multiple white areas because of odd layout. If I was to use one big polygon, the text would center weird. When I have used multiple bubbles, I get strange overlaps/interference. Perhaps my technique is just weak.
FuguTabetai wrote: For the font sizing, it does all that starting at the smallest font size up until it either the text doesn't all fit, or it hits the max font size (which is a user option, as is the min font size.)
I find that the font sizing doesn't seem to do a satisfactory job about 5% of the time. I would love to be able to force the auto sizing to bump up a font size every now and again. Again, this may be me laying down poorly sized bubbles.
FuguTabetai wrote: The start should be the last page number?
No, the opposite. The end of the range should be default to the last image. For me, I get "start at page 1, end at page 1".
FuguTabetai wrote: glad that someone else finds GMAO useful. It is really written only for me, but since it is open source, anyone is free to take it and improve on it, and I'm glad some people can even just use it.
I do find it useful. It is a huge time saver. Just let me know when you want me to shut up with all the comments... :)

Best,

Dave
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Re: Comments on GMAO

Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote:Howdy,

I can't find this functionality. I take it from comments further down that some of it is available through a right click context menu, but I don't get any response when I right click. I wonder if it's part of the same problem with the lack of cut and paste.
Well, it isn't right click necessarily, but whatever is considered a "popup menu trigger" for your OS. For Mac, I believe it is option click. There is a large chance, however, that GMAO will never pop the menu up for you because I only check for popup triggers on mouse down, and I just found out the other day that you need to check for pop-ups on mouse-up for Macs. If you can get a pop-up menu on the Page items in the tree, then I know how to fix the problem.
dDave wrote: So, if I understand you correctly, you draw a bubble, position the mouse over the bubble and press control-n to get the new note input window. The control key functions work on the Mac, but oddly enough, the hide/show bubble function is mapped to option-b key combo. I wonder how that happened as the PC does not have an option key.
Java uses whatever is the normal "Accellerator key" for your OS, so maybe it is option. Control-b toggles bubbles for me.
dDave wrote:
FuguTabetai wrote: Already exists. Check the GMAO->Options->Appearance panel, the Annotation Outline color (normally white) and Annotation Outline Thickness (as well as Draw Annotation outlines.)
Would it be possible to have a button to toggle the outline? That would give quick access to the feature. I would set the outline color to be black, but keep it off until I needed a bounded bubble/box.
Again, if you do a pop-up menu on a bubble, under "Color" you can set all that up on a per-bubble basis.
dDave wrote:
FuguTabetai wrote: Er, I don't see how this would be better than just drawing a bubble without putting a translation with it.
In certain panels I need multiple white areas because of odd layout. If I was to use one big polygon, the text would center weird. When I have used multiple bubbles, I get strange overlaps/interference. Perhaps my technique is just weak.
No, GMAO isn't an image editing program; it works really well in most cases where the text is in a normal bubble. When things get complicated, GMAO has trouble. For very complicated things (like I get in TJTG) I get some help and have someone edit out the offensive text, then use the replace image function to swap out the edited image before I export. (Right click on the picture, not a bubble, get a different menu...)

I don't want to try to turn GMAO into an image editing program, because it would never be a good one. If you had an example of what you are dealing with, maybe I would understand better if there was something that I could add to make stuff work easier. (The main goal of GMAO for me is to make things easier. So in a worse case, I'll just put my translation right over Japanese, and turn on font outlining. Using the "Font" option in the bubble menu pop-up...)
dDave wrote:
FuguTabetai wrote: For the font sizing, it does all that starting at the smallest font size up until it either the text doesn't all fit, or it hits the max font size (which is a user option, as is the min font size.)
I find that the font sizing doesn't seem to do a satisfactory job about 5% of the time. I would love to be able to force the auto sizing to bump up a font size every now and again. Again, this may be me laying down poorly sized bubbles.
You can. Use the bubble-menu pop-up and hit the Font option. You can force it to use any font, any size, turn dynamic sizing on and off, bold, italic, and font outlining.
dDave wrote:
FuguTabetai wrote: The start should be the last page number?
No, the opposite. The end of the range should be default to the last image. For me, I get "start at page 1, end at page 1".
Ah, a minor quibble. I should be able to fix that.
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Re: Comments on GMAO

Post by dDave »

Howdy,
FuguTabetai wrote: Well, it isn't right click necessarily, but whatever is considered a "popup menu trigger" for your OS. For Mac, I believe it is option click.
Control click.
FuguTabetai wrote: I just found out the other day that you need to check for pop-ups on mouse-up for Macs. If you can get a pop-up menu on the Page items in the tree, then I know how to fix the problem.
The popup does work on right click in the page tree.

It sounds like I'm missing out on a large portion of the program without the right click, so I'm going to hold off on further comments until a fix comes along.

In any event, a chapter did get finished, and it was released today.
Thanks again!

Best,

Dave
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Post by FuguTabetai »

Popup fix was just pushed out, so give it a try. You are missing a lot...

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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

Oho! Right click action! It's a whole new world...

Thanks for the quick fix.

Best,

Dave
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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

Three chapters have been run through GMAO and here are some more comments.

Here are features I *really* would love to see

* New translation and New translation from last options in the context menu when you click on a bubble without a translation.
* Edit, New translation and New translation from last options in the context menu when you click on a bubble with a translation.
* I would like to see the page name displayed in some sort of status location. Is it possible to have it in the title bar?
* Option to auto add all the pages in a directory
* Option to output by chapter in addition to page range
* It would be great to tap the space bar and cycle through the tools

Comments and low priority feature requests.

* It's nice to be able to move the button bar to the side, but when you do so, it's twice as wide as actually needed.
* When you have two similar names, Such as Mike and Michael, and you type "M", the drop down shows both names, but then the auto completion looks for the third character rather than the second. This messes me up. So to select Mike you have to type "Mk", and to select Michael, you have to type "Mc". I would prefer to type "Mik" and "Mic" respectively.
* If you cannot actually do anything with the page tree except change pages (i.e., no bubble interaction), do you really need to refresh the page tree with each save and page add? Having to constantly open the tree is a big pain. Or alternately, can you put in "next page" "previous page" buttons?
* .png support with built in pngcrush would be sweet.
* A pref to have the name of the last character used auto populate the character field would speed up my workflow. That way I could do all of character 1 on the page, then move on to character 2, etc.


Bugs

* I noticed you put in a pref for preferred language in the first panel of the options, but you already had it under appearance. In any case, the auto fill for language does not work for me.
* Cut and paste still does not work anywhere in the app on the Mac.
* When you click the move button, it stays highlighted even when you select another tool
* When you export a single page, the vanity strip at the bottom reads "page 0" instead of the actual page number.
* Occasionally, when I have the move tool selected, and I double click in the page, All the balloons and translations have disappeared.
* Occasionally, when I move to another page without saving, the changes I have made on the previous page get discarded.
* Sometimes when I right click on a bubble, the "deleted balloon" option gets selected on mouse up.
* About 10% of the time, the selections will not highlight in the context menu. You can still select the primary selections, but there is no mouse over change. This also means that the secondary menus do not pop unless you actually click on them.
* Sometimes the wrapping code gets a little funky. See http://homepage.mac.com/d_limiter/gmao_confidential.jpg

Praise

While the program still has some rough edges (as apparently does Apple's VM), GMAO is a great program. It allows one to whip out chapters in fairly short order - about two and a half hours for 24 pages, translation time included. I know you wrote GMAO for your own use, but it has proven itself to be a very capable app, and I tip my hat to you.

Best,

Dave
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote:Howdy,

Three chapters have been run through GMAO and here are some more comments.

Here are features I *really* would love to see

* New translation and New translation from last options in the context menu when you click on a bubble without a translation.
* Edit, New translation and New translation from last options in the context menu when you click on a bubble with a translation.
I added both of these in the release I just pushed out today. Those were relatively easy to include.
dDave wrote: * I would like to see the page name displayed in some sort of status location. Is it possible to have it in the title bar?
Probably. It isn't something that I see much need for, but when I have some spare time I'll poke around to see if that would be easy to do or not.
dDave wrote: * Option to auto add all the pages in a directory
This will wait until I have (lots more) spare time - it would take a bit if heavy lifting.
dDave wrote: * Option to output by chapter in addition to page range
I doubt I will do this either, since it would require some GUI interface work, and I don't see how there is much benefit - it is pretty easy to look up and see what page a chapter starts and stops on. This is easier though than adding chapter information to the vanity stuff on the bottom of the page though.
dDave wrote: * It would be great to tap the space bar and cycle through the tools
I don't know how hard that would be, but I'll look into it and add it if it is easy.
dDave wrote: Comments and low priority feature requests.

* It's nice to be able to move the button bar to the side, but when you do so, it's twice as wide as actually needed.
I don't think I've ever even done. I don't do anything unusual with the toolbar code, so it is just using Java's default, in which case I think it would be hard to fix...
dDave wrote: * When you have two similar names, Such as Mike and Michael, and you type "M", the drop down shows both names, but then the auto completion looks for the third character rather than the second. This messes me up. So to select Mike you have to type "Mk", and to select Michael, you have to type "Mc". I would prefer to type "Mik" and "Mic" respectively.
This is something I doubt I would ever do - text completion as you describe it is broken - I do it the correct way. (Or at least correct as far as bash / emacs are concerned.) I could add an option to turn off text completion entirely though, that wouldn't be too hard.
dDave wrote: * If you cannot actually do anything with the page tree except change pages (i.e., no bubble interaction), do you really need to refresh the page tree with each save and page add? Having to constantly open the tree is a big pain. Or alternately, can you put in "next page" "previous page" buttons?
I need to refresh the tree display every time or the pages will not be saved. A next or previous page button would be (surprisingly) pretty hard to put in. I'll spend some more time to see if I can keep the tree open at least, but honestly, it should already be open to the last page you were on. I just don't get something about Java's tree model. Or possibly it is the super convoluted DOM to JTree Model layer I use, but for whatever reason, that is just a really touchy situation.
dDave wrote: * .png support with built in pngcrush would be sweet.
GMAO can load .pngs just fine. I think adding PNG output (sans pngcrush) would be easy. I'll look into it.
dDave wrote: * A pref to have the name of the last character used auto populate the character field would speed up my workflow. That way I could do all of character 1 on the page, then move on to character 2, etc.
I don't think I will spend much time on that since it isn't anything I would be interested in.
dDave wrote: Bugs

* I noticed you put in a pref for preferred language in the first panel of the options, but you already had it under appearance. In any case, the auto fill for language does not work for me.
Those are two different things. The appearance preference lets you select which language and annotator will appear in the bubbles if there are multiple translations.

The new one that I added fills in the language to what you input in the text box. It doesn't work for you? Did you fill it in, quit GMAO and start again? That preference takes a re-start of GMAO to take effect. (Mentioned in the mouse-over info on it, but...)
dDave wrote: * Cut and paste still does not work anywhere in the app on the Mac.
I won't be able to fix this until I get access to a mac for a few hours along with a few hours to track down what is going on. That isn't going to happen anytime soon...
dDave wrote: * When you click the move button, it stays highlighted even when you select another tool
It doesn't on mine, but it could also be that I just can't tell that it is highlighted. I thought I fixed that when I fixed the other button bugs you mentioned, but maybe not.
dDave wrote: * When you export a single page, the vanity strip at the bottom reads "page 0" instead of the actual page number.
Hm, I've never noticed or even tried to check that. I'll look into it.
dDave wrote: * Occasionally, when I have the move tool selected, and I double click in the page, All the balloons and translations have disappeared.
I have no idea on that one. I've never seen it happen, but I also don't double click much...
dDave wrote: * Occasionally, when I move to another page without saving, the changes I have made on the previous page get discarded.
That might happen if you save and then don't re-select the page you are working on. I thought the screen goes blue now on a save, but that is something you have to be careful about. I've been thinking about how to prevent that for a while, but because of the convoluted way that the JTree interacts with the XML file, I haven't thought of a good easy one yet.
dDave wrote: * Sometimes when I right click on a bubble, the "deleted balloon" option gets selected on mouse up.
I've seen this too. It is Java being strange - I don't know why it would happen. It sometimes stays highlited for me, and I need to mouse over it to un-highlite it. I don't know why.
dDave wrote: * About 10% of the time, the selections will not highlight in the context menu. You can still select the primary selections, but there is no mouse over change. This also means that the secondary menus do not pop unless you actually click on them.
I don't know about that one... I mean, I don't know what would be causing it, or what I would do to look at fixing or reproducing it.
dDave wrote: * Sometimes the wrapping code gets a little funky. See http://homepage.mac.com/d_limiter/gmao_confidential.jpg
I can explain that. That is what happens when the text is too big to fit into the bubble outline. If a line of text doens't fit in the bubble, GMAO just shrugs and throws that line to the far left, and paints a background under it. There is no easy fix for it - centering would be just as bad because the "center" would be based on the center of the object's bounding box, which might not have anything to do with where the bubble is at that point... As I've mentioned in the code and What's New thing, when the text is vertically centered GMAO does a very bad job of finding where it should place the text. It would take a major re-write to fix that.

There is a value that controls the "gutter" (space between the bubble shape and text) that can be decreased to increase how close text can flow to the outline, but I'm not sure if that is even a user-visible setting. Nope, it isn't.

The text layout and justification code is the most complicated code in the whole system, so ... It isn't something that I mess with much. Basically though, GMAO will make the fonts as large as possible (in 2 pt increments I think?) - any larger will cause some sort of bad display like that type above.
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote:Howdy,

Three chapters have been run through GMAO and here are some more comments.

Here are features I *really* would love to see

* I would like to see the page name displayed in some sort of status location. Is it possible to have it in the title bar?
Hm, that one should have been "easy" - but for some reason, I hit a major bug when I try to change the window title. I can't isolate the bug outside of GMAO, and there is no reason for it to exist with GMAO (maybe some interaction between the internationalization support and internal sun string stuff??) but looks like that won't happen.

I'll probably look at adding png support next, not that I have much time, but that one is on my list as well.

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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

As always, I appreciate the work you have done on GMAO.

By the way, why does GMAO export images prefixed with "ae_" ? Can the prefix be changed or eliminated?

Best,

Dave
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote:Howdy,

As always, I appreciate the work you have done on GMAO.

By the way, why does GMAO export images prefixed with "ae_" ? Can the prefix be changed or eliminated?

Best,

Dave
It export to ae_ because when I first started translating, I had it export images to the same directory that the original files were in. I didn't want it to overwrite files (there is no warning when exporting images, it will just overwrite the things.)

I'll add in an optional "Exported image prefix" parameter.

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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

More feedback. The biggest continual workflow issues I have are:

* Tree refresh. Having to re-open the tree after each page add and page save is a real pain.
* Gutter spacing. Having access to this in the font menu accessed via the context menu would be great. Sometimes I just need that little extra space to stuff a legible font size into a balloon.
* Adding pages. Auto add of images in a directory would be great. I understand this is major coding and low priority.
* If the bubble text is being rendered as HTML, how hard would it be to allow other tags such as bold?

The gutter spacing is a request. The others are just comments.

Another bug - when I set the vanity string background to white, it will only generate a light grey.

Best,

Dave
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote:Howdy,

More feedback. The biggest continual workflow issues I have are:

* Tree refresh. Having to re-open the tree after each page add and page save is a real pain.
Are you just adding a page, saving, and then adding a page, saving, etc.? In that case, you don't need to open the tree and select the last page again. You only need to select the page if you want to add bubbles to it. Just adding pages though will work fine.

I've really had lots of tryouble trying to get that tree to behave. I have code in there that should have it re-open to the last selected page but it just doesn't work. Some day I'll have the time to track that down...
dDave wrote: * Gutter spacing. Having access to this in the font menu accessed via the context menu would be great. Sometimes I just need that little extra space to stuff a legible font size into a balloon.
Right now, that can't be set on a per-balloon basis. When you change it in the main options, it changes for all bubbles. I guess you could just set it low normally?

Looking at your scans though, I would say that the problem is the one of fitting left-to-right text in bubbles that were made for vertically oriented text. I get around that problem by using larger scans (1024x across) so there is more room. Sometimes, I use the "Rotate text" with the shift key held down (constrain to 45 degree increments) to put the text vertical.

I could try to set the gutter on a per-bubble basis, but it is a few hours worth of coding. And I have to change the XML file specification to save the setting for each bubble.

I guess I should also make the default more reasonable - now if text goes out of the bubble, it pegs to the left of the bounding box and then draws the background color behind the text. I could make it center which would (in most cases) be more presentable.
dDave wrote: * Adding pages. Auto add of images in a directory would be great. I understand this is major coding and low priority.
I haven't really thought about it, but it might not be that bad. What if it was something like "Add all images from (user specified dir) to end of last chapter"? That would be easier than trying to also allow selection of where pages should go, or worse trying to parse file names to get page numbers and inserting in order...
dDave wrote: * If the bubble text is being rendered as HTML, how hard would it be to allow other tags such as bold?
Extremely, extraordinarily hard. Well, actually, I have thought about this. The problem is that I would either have to write my own code for handling all the tags - like I did for <br> - or switch over to using my own front-end parser with the TextLayout class. The TextLayout class is used to add the subscripts for translator notes, but I only use them on the last line of the text because they aren't flexible enough to handle text layout with dynamic font sizing.

If you just meant how hard would it be to allow HTML tags in the Javascript pages, that would be easier, but still a bit of work. And the tags would be visible in the auto-edit image versions.

Right now, the bubbles are really just plain text with one tag: <br>. That would be fine except sometimes the bubble text isn't all the same style. It is rare enough though, and just so much work to add full styled-text support, that I've punted on that one. If I thought it would be easy to extend TextLayout enough to let me do the dynamic font sizing though, I would go that route. But it just really isn't going to happen any time soon.
dDave wrote: The gutter spacing is a request. The others are just comments.

Another bug - when I set the vanity string background to white, it will only generate a light grey.
Hm, I've never changed the vanity string background to anything other than black. I'll check it out. I think I remember some strangeness like that though. Check what I said on gutter spacing - I would try just setting the gutten to a low value (1 pixel?) all the time maybe.
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote: Another bug - when I set the vanity string background to white, it will only generate a light grey.
Pushed out version 1.1.4 (check the GMAO->What's New to see your version number) that fixes this. I had noticed it before, but didn't spend time to track down the bug. Turns out I was calling a fill3DRect when I should have called fillRect (took a while to figure that out though!) Java was trying to make a 3D looking rectangle, but made bad guesses as the size to use, and ended up using a "shading" color for most of the box. I don't know what I was thinking in the first place to use a 3D style rect anyway.

It is fixed now. Jeez, I need to get some real work done today...
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote: By the way, why does GMAO export images prefixed with "ae_" ? Can the prefix be changed or eliminated?
So, I should also note that I added an option for this - in the Files / Data preferences pane. Should be self-explanatory (or there is a mouse tip that pops up with more info.) Just delete it to remove. Note the warning: GMAO will overwrite files, so be careful.

Also, I think I wrote this somewhere else, but GMAO now supports Java's ImageIO system for saving files, so you can save as PNG. Java's encoder does not have compression though (that is a bug on their end) so that isn't working yet.

I just checked using Java's JPG compressor, and the output I get is overlaid with a strange red tint. I don't know WHY that would happen, and I'm content for now to just recommend that people use "JPEG" (which is the open-source JPEG encoder I've been using all along) which doesn't exhibit this strange behavior.
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Post by dDave »

Howdy,
FuguTabetai wrote: Are you just adding a page, saving, and then adding a page, saving, etc.? In that case, you don't need to open the tree and select the last page again.
When a new page is added, GMAO does not update the work area. To see (and work on) a newly added page, you have to open the tree and click on the page name. There would be no issue whatsoever if the work area would update to show the newly added page.
FuguTabetai wrote: Right now, [gutter spacing] can't be set on a per-balloon basis. When you change it in the main options, it changes for all bubbles. I guess you could just set it low normally?
Having the option to change the gutter spacing system wide would be great if it is an easy thing to add.
FuguTabetai wrote: Looking at your scans though, I would say that the problem is the one of fitting left-to-right text in bubbles that were made for vertically oriented text.
Very true. The page size needs to be what it is for a variety of reasons, so increasing page size is out. Learning to hyphenate certain words to get a more efficient wrap is also a valuable technique.
FuguTabetai wrote: I could try to set the gutter on a per-bubble basis, but it is a few hours worth of coding. And I have to change the XML file specification to save the setting for each bubble.
Please put it on your "someday when I have time" list.
FuguTabetai wrote: I guess I should also make the default more reasonable - now if text goes out of the bubble, it pegs to the left of the bounding box and then draws the background color behind the text. I could make it center which would (in most cases) be more presentable.
It seems that would be better default.
FuguTabetai wrote: What if it was something like "Add all images from (user specified dir) to end of last chapter"?
Perfect. As long as there is a text field to type the dir path, since the browse buttons still don't work for me (see much earlier comment).
FuguTabetai wrote: >> If the bubble text is being rendered as HTML, how hard would it be to allow other tags such as bold?

Extremely, extraordinarily hard.
Understood. Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Best,

Dave
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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

I just upgraded to the latest GMAO, and there are problems with the options screen. If you open the option screen, regardless if a change is made to the settings or not, when you hit "ok", you get a error message that pops up. However, the error portion is blank. There is only the icon and a "ok" button.

You can cancel out of the option screen without problem once you dismiss the error box.

Best,

Dave
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Post by FuguTabetai »

I don't have that problem - I've been using the new options for a while now. Is the title of the error dialouge "Options Setting Error"?

If you could check the Java Console and let me know if there is anything there, that would help a lot.
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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

Yes, the title is "options setting error".

I don't see anything in the console except this: "[JavaAppLauncher Warning] Specifying a specific version for JVMVersion 1.4.2 is deprecated. Use the more general 1.4* instead."

Another bug report:

When you export a page range of images, then try to do it again but hit the cancel button instead of hitting "ok", it behaves as if you hit the "ok" button anyway. The full range of pages of the previous export was generated again, even though the page range was still set to the default of "from page 1 to page 1".

Best,

Dave
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Post by FuguTabetai »

Hi dDave I put in some code to print more diagnostics to the console. Like I said, I don't know what the problem could be - this new version works fine on 2 machines that I use. Of course, none of them are Macs. :)

I've known about the page export bug. I try not to hit cancel, but will try to fix it. :wink:

Also, I'll try to change saving a page so that it re-selects the last page you were on. That should help you out a bunch. (Don't know if I will get to any of that today though.)
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Post by FuguTabetai »

Put out version 1.1.5. It fixes the page export bug, has a bit more debugging info for an exception thrown in the Preferences dialouge, and now when you just do a save, the tree stays expanded and you don't have to re-select the page. You still have to expand the tree when you add a new page though.

If you could check the Java Console for that error when you open the Options dialouge, that would be great.

Cheers,

fugu
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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

The save-page fix is excellent. Thank you. Haven't tested the export yet, but I will.

I found that I was looking at the wrong console program. Here is what the Java console told me:

apple.awt.EventQueueExceptionHandler Caught Throwable :
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: null source
at java.util.EventObject.<init>(EventObject.java:34)
at java.awt.AWTEvent.<init>(AWTEvent.java:226)
at java.awt.event.ComponentEvent.<init>(ComponentEvent.java:94)
at java.awt.event.WindowEvent.<init>(WindowEvent.java:174)
at java.awt.event.WindowEvent.<init>(WindowEvent.java:211)
at java.awt.DefaultKeyboardFocusManager.dispatchEvent(DefaultKeyboardFocusManager.java:576)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEventImpl(Component.java:3506)
at java.awt.Container.dispatchEventImpl(Container.java:1627)
at java.awt.Window.dispatchEventImpl(Window.java:1606)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEvent(Component.java:3477)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:456)
at java.awt.SentEvent.dispatch(SentEvent.java:50)
at java.awt.DefaultKeyboardFocusManager$DefaultKeyboardFocusManagerSentEvent.dispatch(DefaultKeyboardFocusManager.java:145)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:454)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:234)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:184)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:178)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:170)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:100)


Best,

Dave
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote:Howdy,

The save-page fix is excellent. Thank you. Haven't tested the export yet, but I will.

I found that I was looking at the wrong console program. Here is what the Java console told me:

apple.awt.EventQueueExceptionHandler Caught Throwable :
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: null source
at java.util.EventObject.<init>(EventObject.java:34)
at java.awt.AWTEvent.<init>(AWTEvent.java:226)
at java.awt.event.ComponentEvent.<init>(ComponentEvent.java:94)
at java.awt.event.WindowEvent.<init>(WindowEvent.java:174)
at java.awt.event.WindowEvent.<init>(WindowEvent.java:211)
at java.awt.DefaultKeyboardFocusManager.dispatchEvent(DefaultKeyboardFocusManager.java:576)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEventImpl(Component.java:3506)
at java.awt.Container.dispatchEventImpl(Container.java:1627)
at java.awt.Window.dispatchEventImpl(Window.java:1606)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEvent(Component.java:3477)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:456)
at java.awt.SentEvent.dispatch(SentEvent.java:50)
at java.awt.DefaultKeyboardFocusManager$DefaultKeyboardFocusManagerSentEvent.dispatch(DefaultKeyboardFocusManager.java:145)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:454)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:234)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:184)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:178)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:170)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:100)


Best,

Dave
Bummer, that doesn't even reference any of my code. I will not be able to debug this without a mac. I'll try to get my hands on one for a while to check this out.
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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

Just for reference, the options worked form me up to GMAO 1.1.3.

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Dave
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Post by FuguTabetai »

Hah! I found the problem. I added a bug fix to prevent it. The problem was that the new "compression type" support for the new imageIO stuff would sometimes be set to a null value, which should not be saved. I put in some logic to make sure that we don't try saving bad states out.

Let me know if you have any further problems with this - it should be fixed.
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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

That fixed the problem - thanks!

Best,

Dave
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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

Here is the latest round... ;)

Feature requests:

* Auto save.
* Auto page add. Sometimes a single page import takes up to ten seconds. Sometimes it's about one and a half seconds. I think it has to do with the way the .jpg is generated by photoshop, but when it's a ten second import, I really *really* wish for batch import.
* Control over gutter spacing. Global is fine at this point. Per balloon would be great long term.
* If a line of text is too big for the bubble, and it auto-paints a background, center it rather than left justify it.
* Styles or macros. One of the most used transformations I do is to put outlined text on a 50% or totally transparent background. It takes quite a few clicks to get it done. A couple possible suggestions: 1) combine the font and color pop ups into one panel. 2) Have a button or palate for common operations.

Bugs:

* The break tag does not consistently work. It seems that if you make any changes to justification or in the font popup panel, that exacerbates the problem.
* If you click on the move tool, it remains highlighted even after you change tools.
* Still have problems with the browse buttons. You can navigate, but cannot select files/directories. I have to manually type the path.

Comments:
* I am not longer crashing as often. This is due to restarting GMAO because the program gets a little funky at times. For instance, it will get stuck on a particular bubble, and no matter what bubble text you try to edit, you get the one it's stuck on.
* Cut and paste does not work.
* when you bring up the context menu, for example to edit a bubble, you must stay within the bounds of the pop up menus - otherwise if your cursor strays outside an touches a different bubble, it can change the focus. Is it possible to disable GMAO awareness of what bubble the cursor is over for the time the context menu has been activated?
* Window states and sizes are not saved. Preferred arrangements have to be set up each time I start GMAO. Because of this hassle, I tend to leave GMAO up and running, which means the program get buggy, which means I then proactively re-start to avoid a crash.
* FYI - Mac OSX puts up an app framework around the Java app. That means there is a Mac OS menu bar with a quit option. If you use the Mac OS quit, GMAO does not save option changes. You have to use the GMAO quit of the java program.

Again, thanks for the program. I'm clear that you write it for your own use, but if you have the time and inclination to look at any of these suggestions, you have my thanks.

Best,

Dave
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote: * It would be great to tap the space bar and cycle through the tools
The "Z" and "X" keys now cycle backwards and forwards through the selected tools in the toolbar. I would have used space, but space already will select the highlighted tool if you use tab to cycle around... (That is part of the default Java keyboard accessibility thinger.)

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Post by FuguTabetai »

Version 1.1.8:

Font Options dialouge now remembers if a particular bubble should have fonts dynamically resize for it or not. (This isn't an important bug fix, but it is a fix.)

Popup menus on a bubble now use the point where the popup was called to determine what bubble to operate on. This fixes the problem of pulling up the popup menu on one bubble, but then mousing into another bubble to actually select the item from the menu (which then performs that operation on the new bubble.) That was a reported bug by dDave.
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote: * If a line of text is too big for the bubble, and it auto-paints a background, center it rather than left justify it.
Done. If text doesn't fit, it now centers to the bounds that the line at that y position could possibly hold. If the y position is outside of the bubble entirely, it searches back and gets the center point for the last line that was in the bubble.
dDave wrote: * Styles or macros. One of the most used transformations I do is to put outlined text on a 50% or totally transparent background. It takes quite a few clicks to get it done. A couple possible suggestions: 1) combine the font and color pop ups into one panel. 2) Have a button or palate for common operations.
This almost certainly won't happen. It only takes a few clicks...
dDave wrote: Bugs:

* The break tag does not consistently work. It seems that if you make any changes to justification or in the font popup panel, that exacerbates the problem.
The br tag is a real hack. It is likely that it is buggy. I guess if you can give me specific cases (like, the XML file) I can try to debug it, but my suggestion is not to rely on it... (I've only got so much time, and that one isn't too high on my list.)
dDave wrote: * If you click on the move tool, it remains highlighted even after you change tools.
I think I fixed that in version 1.1.8 (yesterday.)
dDave wrote: * Still have problems with the browse buttons. You can navigate, but cannot select files/directories. I have to manually type the path.
I won't be able to fix this until I have some time and get access to a mac.
dDave wrote: Comments:
* I am not longer crashing as often. This is due to restarting GMAO because the program gets a little funky at times. For instance, it will get stuck on a particular bubble, and no matter what bubble text you try to edit, you get the one it's stuck on.
I've seen this as well. It is due to some strange Java focus problem.
dDave wrote: * Cut and paste does not work.
Another Mac issue - cut and paste works everywhere for me. Not that this is the Mac's fault - I just don't have experience with it...
dDave wrote: * when you bring up the context menu, for example to edit a bubble, you must stay within the bounds of the pop up menus - otherwise if your cursor strays outside an touches a different bubble, it can change the focus. Is it possible to disable GMAO awareness of what bubble the cursor is over for the time the context menu has been activated?
I fixed that just recently.
dDave wrote: * Window states and sizes are not saved. Preferred arrangements have to be set up each time I start GMAO. Because of this hassle, I tend to leave GMAO up and running, which means the program get buggy, which means I then proactively re-start to avoid a crash.
I'll look into adding this. It shouldn't be too hard, and would be convenient for me as well.
dDave wrote: * FYI - Mac OSX puts up an app framework around the Java app. That means there is a Mac OS menu bar with a quit option. If you use the Mac OS quit, GMAO does not save option changes. You have to use the GMAO quit of the java program.
I just don't know much about Java on the mac platform - while I wish I had one, I don't. I probably won't even look into this... Except for some cursory searches on the web.
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote: Feature requests:

* Styles or macros. One of the most used transformations I do is to put outlined text on a 50% or totally transparent background. It takes quite a few clicks to get it done. A couple possible suggestions: 1) combine the font and color pop ups into one panel. 2) Have a button or palate for common operations.
At first I didn't think this would be useful, but I was wrong. I went ahead and implented a Style Manager into the Options dialouge, so you can set up however many styles you want. You can then apply them from the bubble pop-up menu. The interface for defining styles is slick too, and the styles are pretty useful to me (even with one 3 styles defined, that takes care of everything that I was setting on bubbles before.)

This bumps GMAO up to version 1.2.0. Also in this release is some new documentation (just on how to set up fonts, since there are 4 different ways the font can be set) and I fixed a bug with lines that have Translator Notes - the background is now correct in all situtations (instead of always just white) and the note subscript will be outlined now if it is supposed to be as well.

Hm, I'm not sure what programming work I'll do on GMAO next. I guess I should put an auto-save in there somehow, or think about this batch page adding.
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Post by dDave »

Howdy,

Thanks for all the fixes and new features. That must have been a lot of coding! The styles are amazing, and will speed things up a lot.

I have one bug report - the "New Translation" choice in the pop up menu is greyed out and does not work.

Also, don't know if the net was slow or what, but I had trouble downloading the new .jar file. It took five or six attempts. Most would stall at around 25k of data downloaded. But I finally did get it downloaded, so all is good.

I'll start working on docs pretty soon. Do you just want undocumented sections done, or do you mind re-writes on the stuff you have done?

Best,

Dave
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Post by FuguTabetai »

dDave wrote:I have one bug report - the "New Translation" choice in the pop up menu is greyed out and does not work.
I'll look into that - it has worked for me in the past when I tested it. The "Edit Translation" will only be enabled when you are over a bubble that has a translation to edit. Oops, I know what went wrong. I added the "Styles" menu, and forgot to change the index into the bubble menu for toggling the "Edit Translation" so now it toggles the "New Translation". I'll fix that posthaste.
dDave wrote: Also, don't know if the net was slow or what, but I had trouble downloading the new .jar file. It took five or six attempts. Most would stall at around 25k of data downloaded. But I finally did get it downloaded, so all is good.
I released Tenjo Tenge chapter 64, so all my bandwidth has likely gone down the drain.
dDave wrote: I'll start working on docs pretty soon. Do you just want undocumented sections done, or do you mind re-writes on the stuff you have done?
Well, best would be stuff that isn't documented yet and is confusing. But I'll take anything. :)
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Post by FuguTabetai »

Version 1.2.3: Hold down shift when drawing a polygon to constrain new points to be straigh lines.
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Post by batou »

Fugu,

I really like GMAO. It's a very clever app.

How long did it take you to write GMAO, and what tools did you use (e.g. IDE etc.)?

Also, do you know of any good tutorials on Java 2D graphics.

Domo domo,

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Post by FuguTabetai »

batou wrote:Fugu,

I really like GMAO. It's a very clever app.

How long did it take you to write GMAO, and what tools did you use (e.g. IDE etc.)?

Also, do you know of any good tutorials on Java 2D graphics.

Domo domo,

batou
I've been writing and using GMAO for about 2 years now. I wrote it in my spare time. I don't know how long it took. I used Emacs to write it. IDEs are for wussies. Emacs and javac, that's how I kick it. I also learned Java 2D as I wrote it, so ... well, the code is open source, but more like "open sores". It is all pretty funky code as I was learning my way around a lot of this stuff for the first time.

I basically thought: "I want to translate manga, but I want the translation to be machine-readable, and separate from the image. So, I'll use XML and Java, and make it client server so people can collaborate, and it should be cool." The source code is in the JAR that you download, and it is open source, so feel free to do whatever you want with it. I don't suggest it is good code to learn from because it is crufty. This is stuff that I wrote to teach myself stuff, so probably it isn't the best code in the world...

Anyway, it works. I don't know of any Java 2D tutorials, I just used the API reference, and some of the docs on Sun's website. I'm really impressed with Java though - using Java Web Start the distribution is easy, and GMAO works on both Macs and PCs. And linux. Nice. Performance is acceptable too, as far as I'm concerned.

There is another project similar to GMAO, but it is more to improve workflow between translators and editors. See this thread: http://www.manganews.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=885 the program is called JavaNotes and has a homepage at http://www.porno-muzik.org/~djinn/

So at least one other person had a similar idea. :)

Cheers,

fugu
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FuguTabetai
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Post by FuguTabetai »

Version 1.2.4 has just a single cosmetic change: the Style menu now shows the styles in the fonts as they are defined. Colors and font outlining isn't displayed though (don't know if that would be possible, or even desireable.)
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Post by batou »

Thanks for the info Fugu. I will check out Emacs.
At university we learnt Java by writing Java programs in Notepad. I agree, IDEs are for wussies.

Java rocks. I like it too. I will look around on Sun's website, they will probably have some 2d tutorials somewhere.

Cheers,

batou.
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Version 1.2.5

Post by FuguTabetai »

Remote update from Boston. Hope this works.

(Version 1.2.5) Moved the "status line" down to the bottom of GMAOGUI instead of the bottom of the AnnotatePanel. This lets the toolbar dock in the South as well without the display glitches.

(Version 1.2.5) Window positions for GMAO are now saved. Every time you quit, window positions are saved out and restored on the next run. The location the toolbar is docked at is saved as well, but if you float the toolbar, it reverts back to staying in the North of the display. I can't start the toolbar out in a floated state, or I would save that as well. I can put it in its own window, but it is a kludge; the behavior is not the same, so I dropped support for that.

(Version 1.2.5) Modified FontSelector so that fonts are listed in their own font. Right now hard-coded to 18 points, and selection conventions for drawing (had to implement my own ListRenderer) do not follow the UI conventions yet.)
batou
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Post by batou »

Hi Fugu,

Some of your auto-generated volume scripts have pages missing at the end.

Volume 1's script has 168/172 pages
Volume 2's script has 180/182 pages
Volume 3's script has 173/177 pages
Volume 4's script has 217/220 pages
Volume 5's script has 222/222 pages
Volume 6's script has 206/206 pages
Volume 7's script has 237/237 pages
Volume 8's script has 207/207 pages
Volume 9's script has 206/206 pages
Volume 10's script has 206/206 pages (it looks like it was cut off at the end)

batou
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