New callout context menu option?

[vlimm]

This suggestion is for:

- callout rounded rectangle

- callout ellipse

I would love to see a context toolbar option that allows you to change the tail to be a number of circles (user specified), so that we could easily create thought bubbles as well as speech bubbles.

The "tail height" option would then control how squished the defined number of circles are. (e.g., are they perfectly round, or are they oblongs?)

[GarryP]

Interesting.
So that’s one extra control for “Triangle versus Bubbles” and one extra (optional) control for the number of bubbles.
Should there be a space between the bubbles and, if so, how should that be calculated/specified?

[PaulEC]

I'd quite like a callout with bubbles!

It would also be nice to have a few more shapes available. How about some of these?

 

[GarryP]

Someone else asked for a “Cylinder Shape Tool” recently.
The ‘waves’ can (mostly) be achieved with the “Pen Tool” and some strokes.
The plus shape can (mostly) be achieved with the “Square Star Tool”, rotated by 45 degrees.
The ‘flower’ shape can be achieved with the “Cog Tool”.
Most of the rest I would not call ‘shapes’ but, rather, ‘designs’ as they are too complex to be simple ‘shapes’.

If you want to request a specific shape then I would suggest adding a separate request for it (after making sure that one doesn't already exist).

[PaulEC]

Sorry, I was being a little "tongue in cheek". These are all shapes available in DrawplusX8. (There were some even weirder ones in some of the older versions!) – Possibly the most obscure shape is the phenakistoscope!

The thing is there are a lot of shapes that could be useful occasionally, but I'm not sure how many it would be practical to add, or how many would actually get used very often. As you said it is possible to make these shapes in other ways, just not as easily.

Actually, I think it would be useful to have wavy lines. (Yes, you can do them with the pen tool, but it's not easy to get them spot on.) But they would be better as lines, rather than shapes.

[vlimm]

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

Interesting.
So that’s one extra control for “Triangle versus Bubbles” and one extra (optional) control for the number of bubbles.
Should there be a space between the bubbles and, if so, how should that be calculated/specified?

Thanks for your thoughtful questions. Here's what I'd suggest. If the user specifies N bubbles, then you would have N-1 spaces between bubbles, plus an equally-sized space between the first bubble and the callout... so the total number of spaces ends up being N as well. Bubbles could be equal sizes and evenly spaced. The tail height, position, and angle would still be used to define bubble behaviour.

[GarryP]

Thanks for the extra information, but I’m not sure that what you’ve said clears things up nicely.
For instance, in my attached image I have a three sets of equally-spaced, equally-sized circles – the sizes and spaces still need to be calculated.

1 hour ago, vlimm said:

Bubbles could be equal sizes and evenly spaced.

How does the software decide what sizes and spaces are used?

[vlimm]

11 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Thanks for the extra information, but I’m not sure that what you’ve said clears things up nicely.
For instance, in my attached image I have a three sets of equally-spaced, equally-sized circles – the sizes and spaces still need to be calculated.

How does the software decide what sizes and spaces are used?

Sorry, I actually had that all figured out, and then managed to omit it in my answer. I did some visual experimentation, and found that if each space were 2/3 the size of each bubble, this would be visually pleasing. From there, all the math would be based on the user-defined tail height and angle, and the number of bubbles. 

[GarryP]

2 hours ago, PaulEC said:

Sorry, I was being a little "tongue in cheek".

Ah, apologies, my mistake.

I’ve attached a video showing one method for getting a half-decent way line.

[walt.farrell]

As it may be of interest to those participating in this thread:

 

[GarryP]

vlimm: I stepped back a bit and made a quick mock-up of what it would look like if there were four bubbles (I’ve used rectangles), all of equal heights, all equally spaced, with the spaces between each as the same height as the bubbles, and the corners of the bubbles following the lines of the triangle.
As you can see, the result doesn’t look very nice and I can’t see how it could be made to look better.
Would you be able to give us an example of what you think should happen because I’m not able to visualise what you want?

[PaulEC]

I never realised you could space the nodes equally like that! This is certainly easier than trying to align everything on a grid (which is how I've done it in the past). To be honest though, I still think it would be handy to be able to set frequency and amplitude (I think those are the right terms!) and for the amount of point or curve (I haven't a clue what that is called!) for lines, without having to adjust the nodes manually. Maybe I'll suggest it sometime, but I have a feeling it was requested years ago and nothing came of it!

[vlimm]

On 6/19/2022 at 9:06 PM, GarryP said:

vlimm: I stepped back a bit and made a quick mock-up of what it would look like if there were four bubbles (I’ve used rectangles), all of equal heights, all equally spaced, with the spaces between each as the same height as the bubbles, and the corners of the bubbles following the lines of the triangle.
As you can see, the result doesn’t look very nice and I can’t see how it could be made to look better.
Would you be able to give us an example of what you think should happen because I’m not able to visualise what you want?

GarryP, thanks for your question. Sorry for the delay in response. My notifications somehow got mucked up. Here's the visualization you requested.

Here I've used the following configuration for my callout:

Here, I've created a bubble-based callout, with bubbles that gradually decrease in size according to the decrease in the callout tail, assuming a 4-bubble setting. The space between the first bubble and the callout is equal to 2/3 the vertical size of the first bubble. All other inter-bubble spacing is the same as this.

In this case, I've assumed the bubble size will be defined by the callout tail width. There is equal space between the bottom of the last bubble and the bottom of the tail as there is between all the other bubbles.

When we take away the original callout box, the bubble version looks like this:

It's first thing in the morning for me here, so I've just done a rough approximation based on vertical height for the bubble distance, but a case could be made that it would be more accurate to do a diagonally-based calculation. But I don't have the brainpower right now to get into that, and I think this version looks pretty good