Export UI design proposal #3417
Description
This is more of a design document than a feature request. I'm not particularly attached to any of these ideas, but maybe some of them are worth sharing.
The main design goal was to create an export UI that covers exporting any static Graphite project as a bitmap file—ranging from a single image to multiple images in various formats, sizes, and resolutions, as well as placing them in a specified path (or multiple paths), including nested ones. I believe this could meet the needs of many users.
The main design concept is to use a flat list, where each row represents one export file. Each export row can include multiple file / image preferences, which will be considered when exporting. This approach could facilitate the easy export of the same artboard in multiple dimensions, resolutions, file types, and more. The flat list could also be easily expanded into a folder/layer tree layout for exporting images to specific locations on a drive.
Once the export presets are filled they should be stored in .graphite project file by default. It also could be possible to import/export them as human-readable config file.
Features:
Export single artboard as a single image file.
Export single artboard in many sizes and formats.
Export single artboard in many sizes/formats and specify location for all of them at once.
Export multiple artboards as images that share the same dimensions/format.
Advanced panel.
This could be used for displaying image metadata or for less-used export options like TIFF compression types, PNG dither, etc.
Export Preset buttons.
Selection.
Selection could use the same mechanics as selecting / deselecting image layers along with the use of modifier keys like [Shift] and [Ctrl]. Areas for selecting / deselecting could be the thumbnail, empty row background and grab icon on the right.Selected single file:
Selected multiple files:
Selected multiple files in a row:
Moving files around.
With tree layout it could be possible to easily move an export file from one export location to another by drag'n'drop. For this purpose each row as well each directory should have grab handle (6 dots on the right). Before:
Moving the file and highlighted drop area.
Same as image layers export files during moving operation could be displayed as 'ghosts' with some transparency.
After the move is done the export row should have its export path modified to fit the new location. Export filename and other properties should be kept intact.
Multi-file property editing.
With the use of selection and highlights it could be also possible to edit a single property for multiple files. This should have another design pass as many filetypes have similar but different properties (bitdepth for jpg and png for example). Personally I'd limit this functionality to only couple properties that will work 100% of the time - like filetype, size and maybe resolution and units.
RGB/CMYK Color modes and profiles.
Export UI might not be the right place to do color management and still needs to be properly fleshed out. Most mockups in this proposal do include option to change RGB to CMYK during export which is something that will rarely work without proper sorftproofing and other Color Management operations. A solution to this is to only display color mode and profile by greying out color mode selector.
Things that I omitted on purpose:
- PDF and DTP specific exports - I think it should have its own export UI, but it possible could adapted to fit this design
- video and animation - pretty much the same as above
- icc color profiles - I'm not sure how color profiles will be implemented (per document / per artboard / per layer group ?)
- exporting bitmaps or composite Graphite document as vector images - its unclear to me how vectorization of bitmap layers will look like
TODO: Path and directories handling and policies.
- Inheriting path when duplicating a directory?
- Remove directory on the drive when it is removed from Export Preset UI?
- automatically create new directories on a drive that were specified in the path fields
- ???
TODO: Automatic system for maintaining export image aspect ratio.
- input UI for enabling this feature
- automatically calculate second dimension based on image aspect ratio (auto w/h)
TODO: File versioning.
- versioning preferences - where to store?
- append numbers manually after the file with -/+
- append numbers automatically after the file with -/+
- Default policy for handling duplicated export file - append numbered prefix / suffix?
TODO: Artboard thumbnail selector.
- mockup