TechDraw: Rework annotation tools - Repost

[PaddleStroke]

Note this grant request is a repost of #26 with a significantly lower compensation. The reason is : FreeCAD does not have enough money to pay developpers. So I funded this feature by making it for AstoCAD. And the compensation asked here is mostly for the PR management and adjustments asked by reviewers.

Proposal description

Currently techdraw has 2 annotation tools. And both are not ideal.

• The first has a very weird UI with + - buttons that you need to use to add lines. Tedious to use. And it does not support any formating.
  

• The second one is better as it let you format text properly. But its UI is still quite clunky.
  
  It has 2 editor widgets, one with HTML capability in a separate dialog. Which can be opened by clicking a button. And you need to click save not close or you loose your text. And after the creation, if you double click the view you can get the HTML editor back. But nothing to change the size of the box

My proposal is to make a new tool replacing existing.

A prototype of such tool is already being tested in AstoCAD. A presentation video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU6jVJ3_8Sc

Fix FreeCAD/FreeCAD#12371

Deliverables

PR with the feature

Timeline

• PR as soon as it is approved.
• PR management, fixes and others.
• Post PR-fixes

Risks and mitigation

Not much risk. A mostly ready prototype is already showcased.

Compensation

2000€.

About you

Pierre, paddle on the forum, PaddleStroke on github

In the past I have done a lot of work on FreeCAD: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3APaddleStroke+is%3Aclosed

[Reqrefusion]

I'm glad you came back for this. The prototype looks great. It's a shame you had to give up the much cooler floating toolbar, but this is perfectly acceptable. I'm sure @FreeCAD/design-working-group has an idea for this too. Compensation was seen as the biggest issue in your previous proposal. I think you've made it acceptable here, but another comment said "A unified text tool would be better than another, different tool." What are your thoughts on this?

[PaddleStroke]

So in my prototype I am using the HTML editor and embed it in the taskbox. My plan was to reuse this in Sketcher to have a similar UI. However it appears that the text to path library does not handle HTML formating. It only handle raw text. Which is why the sketch text tool is not reusing the same taskbox afterall.

I am not sure what a 'unified text tool' would be. Would it be a tool that works in both TechDraw, Part, Sketcher etc? If so I am not sure of the value and feasability of this. Because each workbench has specific need. What makes sense is to reuse as much of the UI as possible, for instance the HTML editor, when possible. But as stated above Sketcher and draft tools do not support html as of now.

[obelisk79]

Ok, so there are some dramatic improvements here. I wonder about the effectiveness of embedding the rich text editor in a task panel however, due to the nature of task panel sizing and the nature of editing larger blocks of text. How are you handling this?

[PaddleStroke]

This is a good point. AstoCAD is handling this well because it has a clean auto-resize of the task panel to fit content. But in main where you have to manually resize it's true that it's going to be a pain.

One solution would be to put the HTML buttons in a wrap layout. This way the controls would go on two lines when the task is small.

[pierreporte]

IMO a window is better to edit annotations.

We’re dealing there with large annotations because they act like views and are not short call-outs with an arrow that are part of an existing views. So these rich text annotations can get very long in the real world and the lines quite long as well. If the task panel resizes automatically like in AstoCAD, the panel will look pretty bad. In FreeCAD the shrink text will look bad.

Since the text is pre-rendered in the already existing rich text editor, there is no need to show the page (unlike in Catia where you need to look at the page to see how it looks among other things).

As said earlier, it will also solve how to make the toolbar look good.

@PaddleStroke for sketcher, you could make a simple entry that generates plain text, and add a button next to it to open the rich text editor. If rich text is entered, then the plain text entry could be disabled.

[obelisk79]

I too feel like this makes more sense as a modal dialog, which does deviate from the task panel paradigm, but makes more sense to me.

[PaddleStroke]

As it is in AstoCAD it feels comfortable even for a very long text. See above example. But it is true that if the task is of regular width, then it will probably be not so good.

Ideally it would be best to not have the editor in the task and to modify the text directly on the view. I should try to make that again.

[marcuspollio]

modify the text directly on the view

IMHO, the modification of the annotation text directly on the view, with its formatting options/editor on top of the annotation frame/block, seems the simplest and most intuitive approach for users.

Based on your prototype, I like you can simply double-click to edit the annotation (on the view like the current Rich Text one). Adding this ability on the Tree as well would be handy.
Resizing the annotation by simply dragging its frame (without going into edit mode or use the Properties) is also useful, although different from the current logic with object Views where dragging their frame (or label) moves them.

Other than a few back-and-forth with the Design Group to refine some aspects, it's great to see these tools improving for greater consistency and better usability.

[obelisk79]

I agree with Marcus, if you can edit directly with simple formatting icons at the top of the frame would be a best-case solution imo, you could even ditch the size options in-favor of frame corner dragging. If that isn't viable, my opinion remains that this should be a modal dialog at least for now until a better option is available. Expecting users to resize docked panels for better editing experience is bad for UX.

Still, this is really great progress overall.

[pierreporte]

Yes it would be better if user could edit the annotation directly on the page. There could be some floating toolbar like the Microsoft Office mini toolbar (picture below). It could even be shown when the annotation don’t fit the screen and perhaps be generic enough to replace some modal dialogs like sketch dimension editing.

[Reqrefusion]

Yes it would be better if user could edit the annotation directly on the page. There could be some floating toolbar like the Microsoft Office mini toolbar (picture below). It could even be shown when the annotation don’t fit the screen and perhaps be generic enough to replace some modal dialogs like sketch dimension editing.

The floating toolbar can be a hassle. It was mentioned in the previous proposal and needs a lot of tweaking.

[PaddleStroke]

Maybe we can start by having the controls in the task panel while the text edition is done in the view directly

[PaddleStroke]

But yes floating buttons would be best I guess if it's not too invasive.