2009/9/29 bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...>:
For example, in this case, if we make guides selectable, this will open a whole can of worms - people will complain that the guides cannot be painted by clicking on a color swatch, cannot be aligned with Align dialog, cannot be grouped etc. etc. A lot of things that are natural for objects make little sense for guides, but by allowing to select them we hint that they are "sort of" objects. The amount of special-casing that this will require in the code and, more importantly, in user documentation and user habits and practices is rather frightening.
Yes, this is more or less what I thought too but did not write in the comment :)
We MIGHT avert opening this can of worms if we create a grids & guides tool (or more generically a drawing helpers tool) that lets one create and select guides, rename them, distribute, etc. Alignment to objects would be best done by snapping. This would prevent the confusion between the concepts of object selection and guide selection, in much the same way there is no confusion between the concept of node and object selection in the node tool.
Another possilibity is to make guidelines SPObjects that are hidden when exporting, and not rendered by any other SVG viewers because they use the "inkscape" XML namespace, or are actually stored in some special toplevel element (after all this is why we have the SPObject/XML::Node separation). This is moderately problematic (for example guides do not have a bounding box) but might work.
Regards, Krzysztof