Google Summer Of Code
Week 3 Summary

Week 3 Summary

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Vaibhav Malik
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Table of contents

Introduction

I am Vaibhav Malik, a Google Summer Of Code contributor and developer at Inkscape. This blog summarizes my progress during the third week of the Google Summer Of Code 2023.

June 12

As per Mikekov's suggestions, I started working on using multiple popover buttons to manage overflowing content in the toolbars. After thinking for some time, I decided to create a new ToolbarMenuButton widget for this task. And it will also be Gtk::Builder derivable. Below is the ToolbarMenuButton class structure.

class ToolbarMenuButton : public Gtk::MenuButton
{
    int _priority;
    std::string _tag;
    std::vector<std::pair<int, Gtk::Widget *>> _children;
    Gtk::Box *_popover_box;

public:
    ToolbarMenuButton();
    ~ToolbarMenuButton() override{};

    ToolbarMenuButton(BaseObjectType *cobject, const Glib::RefPtr<Gtk::Builder> &refGlade);

    void init(int priority, std::string tag, std::string icon_name, Gtk::Box *popover_box,
              std::vector<Gtk::Widget *> &children);

    int get_priority();
    std::string get_tag();
    std::vector<std::pair<int, Gtk::Widget *>> get_children();
    Gtk::Box *get_popover_box();
    int get_required_width();
};

June 13

Even though the class structure was clear to me, the class methods were yet to be defined. I started by asking questions to myself.

  • How will Glade identify which child belongs to which popover?

    • Assign a tag to each ToolbarMenuButton and add the same tag style class to its children widgets.

    • Then, as soon as the button is initialized, add the children to its children vector.

  • Which ToolbarMenuButton will be collapsed first?

    • Use the priority property.

  • How to handle the movement of children between the toolbar and their ToolbarMenuButton?

    • Use the same logic as used for resize_handler but, this time, move all the children of that popover in or out at once.

  • How to manage different ToolbarMenuButton widgets in the toolbar?

    • Use two stacks, one to store the collapsed ToolbarMenuButton widgets and the other to store the expanded ones.

    • If the toolbar size is decreasing, pop out the top-most menu button widget in the expanded stack, move its children inside the popover and push the menu button into the collapsed stack. In the end, set the menu button visible.

    • On the other hand, if the toolbar size increases, check if the toolbar is large enough to house the last collapsed menu button's children widgets. If yes, then move the children from the popover to the toolbar. And transfer the just expanded menu button to the expanded stack. And set the menu button invisible.

June 14

I was determined to wrap up the toolbar menu button's class methods today. Just as I expected, configuring the widget to integrate with the builder consumed most of my time. But as I kept trying, I started getting the hang of it. When I got it working, I gave myself a treat, lol. Next, I added the remaining methods to the class.

Link to the video featuring the Select toolbar having multiple toolbar menu button widgets:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11JGpcjO8KKAZu6yH8_sAc3vOrxzg6n57/view?usp=sharing

June 15

Today, I Asked Mikov and Tav for a review of the latest implementation. They liked this idea and gave some suggestions to make it better.

  • Add icons to the menu buttons.

  • Remove the Gtk::Separator widget from the popovers. As it looks like a line in some themes.

  • Some translatable strings fixes.

  • Create a new CSS style class for all the popovers to keep the style consistent between different popovers.

  • Try removing the context_item style class, as it seems odd in the code and not very noticeable.

June 16

Worked on the suggestions and added CSS style classes to the popovers in the toolbar-select.ui file. Fixed translatable strings and removed separators from popovers. Added dummy images as icons inside the ToolbarMenuButton widgets.

June 17 and June 18

I noticed that, on switching tools, the new toolbar was behaving bizarrely. I tried to investigate this issue. It seems like some allocation problem to me. I will fix it in the coming days. And then I enjoyed the weekend :)

Conclusion

That's all for this week. I'm happy I could add some code and better functionality this week. Stay tuned for further updates. Thanks for reading. Sayonara :)

Inkscapegsoc2023Gtk 4C++