Vector-brushes

Vector brushes for existing drawing tools (Pattern Along Path backend)

Adds a Shape drop-down to Freehand and Bezier with None, Clipboard and a few presets as options. When a path is drawn, the clipboard or preset shape is automatically applied to the path via pattern along path, allowing users to easily draw "complex strokes" and edit the direction. Also includes a few other proposals (bezier vs Spiro mode, access to dash and marker styles from toolbar) to show that they fit.

Examples of what can be produced with presets:

Gui

See mock-up. Clipboard mode or Presets are accessed via drop-down.

Width control: you specify a base unit (ex.: 0.2 pixels), and with the directional keys you can multiply this base unit. The resulting value is the width of the stroke (be it simple or a complex LPE stroke).

When LPE mode is activated, the underlying horizontal object is scaled so that its maximum height is this value, so you can easily control the width of the resulting object.

Note: the resulting LPE object will automatically have its own stroke disabled, though power users can still add one via Fill&Stroke dialog. The reasoning is that complex strokes don't need strokes of their own, especially not one of the same size...

Clipboard items though retain their own Fill and Stroke settings (save for rescaling), the reasoning being that if people create an object and want to draw with it, they probably don't want its properties to suddenly change (you copy a red heart but the drawn result is green).

Work flow

When activated, the user draws a path as usual, and when finished the form is automatically applied to it via Pattern Along Path. Editing pops out the red line for the skeleton (it is assumed that users would not want to finely edit the form of each individual hair stroke or such).

For users that Do need more precise forms or form editing, this could be done via a sub-mode of Edit, or by having the user creating the precise form himself, copy it and applying it via Clipboard.

Other items

I'd like to be able to access both stroke style and marker style from the top-level instead of from the Fill & Stroke dialog.

In any case, the mock-up shows everything fits into a bar a bit less than the current one for Select and Calligraphy, so all's good!

Credits

MUCH credits to Bulia Byak for noting that this should be implemented as a sub-mode of the Freehand and Bezier tools, and for extensive UI mentoring all along the way! Thank you!

Additional notes

People will ask for additional, "jitter" functionalities sooner or later: randomnize the color and size of the multiple copies produced with clipboard -> repeated. This future functionality will probably be stuffed into the LPE dialog (with presets possible), as it certainly won't fit into the top-level toolbar...