Design proposal for Export UI #3417
Description
This is more of a design document than a feature request. I'm not particularly attached to any of these ideas, but maybe some of them are worth sharing.
The main design goal was to create an export UI that covers exporting any static Graphite project as a bitmap file—ranging from a single image to multiple images in various formats, sizes, and resolutions, as well as placing them in a specified path (or multiple paths), including nested ones. I believe this could meet the needs of many users.
The main design concept is to use a flat list, where each row represents one export file. Each export row can include multiple file/image preferences, which will be considered when exporting. This approach could facilitate the easy export of the same artboard in multiple dimensions, resolutions, file types, and more. The flat list could also be easily expanded into a folder/layer tree layout for exporting images to specific locations on a drive.
Core design features:
- export same artboard in multiple formats
- export multiple artboards in same or different formats
- collapsible 'advanced' panel for each export row
- quickly export entire document, specific directory or file
- easily duplicate export parameters for a file or directory
Additional Quality-Of-Life features:
- automatically calculate second dimension based on image aspect ratio (auto w/h)
- automatically create new directories on a drive that were specified in the path fields
- preference of overwrite, make new numbered version of the same file (like in Blender)
- export presets are saved inside Graphite document
- save export presets as .conf/JSON file or other Graphite-specific format, should be human readable IMO
Things that I omitted on purpose:
- PDF and DTP specific exports - I think it should have its own export UI, but it possible could adapted to fit this design
- video and animation - pretty much the same as above
- icc color profiles - I'm not sure how color profiles will be implemented (per document / per artboard / per layer group ?)
- exporting bitmaps or composite Graphite document as vector images - its unclear to me how vectorization of bitmap layers will look like
Export single artboard as a single image file:
Export single artboard in many sizes and formats:
Export single artboard in many sizes/formats and specify location for all of them at once:
Export multiple artboards as images that share the same dimensions/format:
Advanced panel could be used for displaying image metadata or for less-used export options:
