On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Eric Jonas wrote:
1. Text snapping appears to snap to all edges of a particular textblock. Would there be any interest to changing this to snapping to the anchor point in the text, where you initially click the "text" cursor (the i-beam)? This would make it much easier to have the baseline for text line up -- i.e. at the moment (using the current CVS) text with letters that drop below the baseline (words like "happy") snap to the lowest point in the word (the bottom of the 'p' instead of the bottom of the 'h').
Good idea. This should probably be treated as a bug, since it's definitely not 'expected behavior'.
- Grouped objects can snap to any of the internal nodes when "snap
points to grid" is enabled. But not when "snap to bounding box" is selected. What I really want (and what I think most users expect, and would most clearly emulate Illustrator's behavior -- but I could be wrong) is a "snap to the points in a group which form a convex hull around the object".
I also use Inkscape for technical drawing and also have noticed that the snapping usability is a bit off. It's better than it used to be, though, but like you say sometimes it is hard to just get things snapping where you expect them to.
Point #2 is important to me because I create lots of little EE symbols that are groups of off-grid objects, but inside of an on-grid object (think a register symbol, or anything with internal text that's smaller than the grid size).
I know snapping may be a religious issue with some, and I know that someone else was working really hard on getting the snapping behavior "just right". I'm going to punt the rest of my real work for today and see if I can implement these changes in the current CVS -- what do people think, are these desired behaviors? If so, would a patch be well-received?
Personally I think that'd be great. It's true that we have a mix of developers, and that some people prefer artistic-oriented snapping and others technical-drawing-oriented snapping, so it may take some work to find a snapping solution that'll address all needs, and/or includes preference settings for users to select how it should behave.
This project's policy since the start has been to receive and include all (topical and legally acceptable) patches into the codebase, and discuss later. The one exception is if the patch comes in really close to a release and there won't be sufficient time for review/discussion, we may choose to delay inclusion until post-release. Sometimes Bulia will suggest some alterations before including it, but I think it's pretty unusual for a patch to not get included.
Anyway, so we couldn't say whether it'd be well-received by everyone, but we can say it'll get a fair shake. :-)
I wonder, if there's enough of us with an interest in the technical drawing capabilities of Inkscape would it make sense for us to collaborate on creating a wiki page listing the changes we'd need?
Bryce