Re: Non-quadratic form of whiteout

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

Hi Harm,

thanks much for the ideas and pointers to old discussions!

So my first suggestion would be to drop the boolean argument for 'whiteout.
> Instead let the user decide. Providing a number shouldn't be too hard.
> Dropping the boolean was already disussed here:
> https://codereview.appspot.com/236480043/#msg15
> Though, I don't see much arguments. otoh it's not unlikely I don't
> understand the argument(s) ;)
> A disadvantage would be the neeed to code some convert-rule (which is
> beyond my coding-capabilities).
>

I didn't do this because I didn't want to break existing scores. To me,
removing the boolean variant which provides default values seems like
killing a feature and not gaining much for it. Your statement sounds as if
you dislike the clumsyness of "boolean or number or even something else"?


> Quite often users (including myself) want to customize the
> whiteout-amount even more than currently possible.
> So my second suggestion is to make whiteout accepting a number-or-pair.
> A number would do what's already done with it.
> A simple pair like '(1 . 2) would extent the whiteout-amount for
> x-y-axis differently.
>

This is exactly what I implemented (tried to implement).


> A pair-list like '((1 . 2)(3 . 4)) would extent the whiteout-amount in
> x-axis with the values of the first pair, in y-axis with the values of
> the second pair.
>

Good idea! But wouldn't it be cleaner to use a pair of pairs instead of a
list of pairs?


> Providing a pair or a pair-list will not work for 'outline ofcourse, I
> don't have a good thought how to deal with this style, though.
> Probably printing a message and/or providing some default, which may
> be zero.
>

This already opened a discussion which, I think, goes in an orthogonal
direction - it already showed that 'outline whiteouts are a quinte
different beast from boxes.
@Kieren et al.: Is there really a use-case for 'outline whiteout with
changing thickness dependent on the angle? (But of course I agree that
there are cases where even the 'outline technique we have now produces
less-than-optimal results, as can already be seen in the discussions Harm
pointed us to.)

Best
Lukas