
What Is Skencil?
===============

Skencil is an interactive vector drawing program for X (similar to XFig
or tgif). It is written almost completely in Python, an object oriented
interpreted programming language.

This is a stable release. It is quite featureful and usable, but there
are still things missing that I want in a 1.0 release, hence the low
version number.

To compile and run Skencil, you need some additional software. Have a look
at the file INSTALL to see what you need and how to install Skencil.

Skencil was originally named "Sketch" (it was renamed with release
0.6.16) and the name "Sketch" is still used is many places.


Resources:
==========

Change-Log:

	See the file NEWS and Plugins/ChangeLog for plugin specific
	changes

Website:

	http://www.skencil.org

Mailing Lists:

        Users:

	http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/sketch-list

	Subscription through the web interface or by sending a mail with
	the word subscribe in the subject to
	<sketch-list-request@lists.sourceforge.net>

	Developers:

	http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/sketch-devel

Bugs and Patches:

	https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/skencil/

	Please report bugs to one of the mailing lists or through the
	bug-tracker


Features
========

Skencil already has the following features:

	o Drawing primitives:
		o Rectangles, with optional round corners
		o Ellipses (full ellipses, arcs, pie slices, chords)
		o Bezier curves (single and multi path)
		o External images:
			o Raster images: JPEG, GIF,...
			  (all types the Python Imaging Library can read)
			o Encapsulated PostScript (EPS)
		o Text

	o All objects, including images and text, can be rotated,
	  scaled, sheared, etc. (all affine transformations are
	  possible)

	o Primitives can usually have fill and line properties:

		o Fill properties are patterns like solid colors,
		  gradients, tiled images and hatching.

		o Line properties are currently a (solid) color, width,
		  dashes, cap and join styles and arrow heads. Patterns
		  instead of a single color are planned for the future.

	o Special Effects and Features:

		o Bezier curves, rectangles and ellipses can be used as
		  guides in addition to the standard vertical and
		  horizontal guide lines.

		o Blend Groups: Automatically updated interpolations of
		  arbitrary objects

		o Text can be converted to bezier objects. (This only
		  works if skencil has access to the PostScript Type 1
		  font files (pfa or pfb)).

		o Text along a Path

	o Export file-formats:

		o Encapsulated PostScript

		o Adobe Illustrator files

		o Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

	o Import file-formats:

		o XFig files (.fig) (incomplete)

		o Adobe Illustrator files (.ai)

		o Windows Meta File (WMF, Windows 3.1)

		o Corel's CMX

		o Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

	o Unlimited undo history

	o User scripts


Limitations
===========

o Currently, only TrueColor visuals with depths of 15, 16, 24 or 32 bits
  and 8-bit PseudoColor visuals are supported.

o Rotated and otherwise transformed text requires (as far as I know) at
  least X11R6. See below for more information on fonts.


License
=======

Most of Skencil is released under the GNU Library General Public License
(see the file COPYING for details). The only exceptions are the module
Pax (in the Pax directory) and the stream filters (in the Filter
directory). See the respective READMEs for details.


Problems
========

There are some problems you may run into which can be solved by changing
Skencil's configuration or the X-server's configuration.


ImportError: No module named Image
----------------------------------

This message means that the Python Imaging Library (PIL) is not
installed correctly. Follow the instrctions in the PIL README.



Font Problems
-------------


Exception TclError: font "..." doesn't exist
--------------------------------------------
If you get a message like

     Exception TclError: font "[some text with lots of hyphens]" doesn't
     exist

when browsing fonts in the font dialog, the reason is probably that
Skencil tries to use fonts that are not installed in the X-server or the
font server (if you use one). Refer to the ``User's Guide'' on how to
install fonts and configure Skencil.



Cannot load '[...]'
-------------------
When Skencil tries to display the drawing, you get messages like

     Cannot load 'MyFont-Bold':
     no such font

This can have two reasons:

1. Skencil tries to use fonts that are not installed in the X-server.
   Refer to the ``User's Guide'' on how to install fonts and configure
   Skencil.

2. Your server cannot handle transformed fonts or maybe not even scaled
   fonts. See the next section for details.



Transformed Fonts
-----------------

To rotate, shear or otherwise transform fonts, Skencil relies on the
capabilities of the server. This means, that the server has to be able
to understand X font names of the form 
	`-*-*-*-*-*--[0 0 0 0]-*-*-*-*-0-*-*'. 

The `[0 0 0 0]' stands for a matrix describing the transformation (the
zeros are replaced by the coefficients of that matrix). Not all servers
support this. To find out if a server supports this run xlsfonts(1) like
this:

     $ xlsfonts -fn '-*-*-*-*-*--[0 0 0 0]-*-*-*-*-0-*-*'

If your server supports this feature, a list of font names should be
printed. You will probably get an error message otherwise.

As far as I know, this syntax for transformed fonts was introduced in
X11R6.


