One way how I could see it is to add a "Crop..." button in the image
bounding box dialog, next to "Get from file".
I think this would be reasonably well discoverable by a user. It also
has the advantage that users who don't know a PDF viewer that can crop
PDFs can use it directly.
Then, there is the question of how to implement the box selection. It
could be done in the main (text editing) window, or in a new dialog.
Selection in the main window would be the easiest and fastest way.
However, if selection is done in the main window, then the user cannot
change the screen zoom factor during selection, and may even select
portions outside the document (which would be ignored). Also, the dialog
window would have to stay open, such that "Apply/OK/Cancel" can be used
later.
This would make for an easy selection but it would be difficult to
select a region precisely. A pop-up window with a zoom/pan control would
allow a more fine-grained selection, but generate another GUI element on
top of the dialog, and be more cumbersome for quick and easy cropping.
It would, however, be more consistent with how LyX operates in general:
you select an element (such as an image), a dialog pops up, and a few
elements within that dialog again open a new window (such as "Browse..."
to select the image file). A direct manipulation in the text window
would go "up (image properties)/down (main window)/up (back to the image
properties)" in terms of UI layers.
So IMHO if implemented in LyX, I see two ways, a choice between a quick
operation and a more consistent/controllable way to do it.
I think this is a useful addition for the cropping of images. The way I
now have to crop an image is to guess some numbers, press Apply, check
in the main LyX window whether it is correct, adjust the numbers,
check.. and so forth.
It might be useful to select the region to crop to just by using the mouse.
Vincent
--
Regards,
Cyrille Artho - http://artho.com/
The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it.
-- Stanley Kubrick
