Paint tools and image creation

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2017-08-22 20:31, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
> Mark Waddingham wrote:
> 
>> Basically, only the browser, pointer and help tools will recurse into
>> groups - the paint tools will not....
> 
> ...nor drawing tools or object tools (eg field or button).

Well that's a slightly different case here - although perhaps it 
explains why things are as they are.

There is explicit code which stops tools doing anything inside groups - 
only the group ever receives 'mouse focus' when in one of the 
drawing/object/painting tools. It *does not* recurse into children.

Thinking about it, this does make some sense; although when combined 
with the 'auto-create an image if no top-level one exists', things start 
to make slightly less sense.

Of course, one option (which is actually quite obvious - I think it 
would work) would be to allow a tool property on images. It seems 
slightly crazy that (essentially), if you switch to a paint tool you can 
edit any non-referenced top-level image! Surely any app would want some 
control over that (outside of the IDE, perhaps)...

> Any opportunity here to generalize the solution to accommodate this?

> tool property for groups/creating objects in groups interactively
> http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=623

I think that is a slightly different case to this.

Indeed, it is orthogonal to tool of image - the tool of a group could be 
any tool which manipulates objects (including creation), as a group 
contains objects; the tool of an image could be any tool which 
manipulates pixels, as an image is a collection of pixels.

I fear that these two parts of code are quite distinct, however, so it 
isn't a case of do one and get the other free... The image one is 
probably quite straight-forward (although, I could well be wrong); the 
group one (judging by the code I delved into y'day) not so 
straight-forward!

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

P.S. This idea might also give a much better way to do the 'editMode' of 
graphics - i.e. a tool property which determines the mouse interactions 
within the graphic. I wish I had seen that potential pattern years ago 
when we added editMode...

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps