On Sun, 25 Jan 2004, bulia byak wrote:
lists only cm, mm, in, pt, pc. So the question is: why do we have meters in the units drop-down lists at all? Isn't it safer to remove them?
Any insights?
I've used inkscape for doing house plans. Having meters was quite useful for that. We may end up having a global scale factor for doing map work (which is something that bryce was interested in).
Of course it's useful, but what about SVG conformance? Even if we convert meters to e.g. inches on save, how will Inkscape know that they should be translated back to meters when loaded? Looks like we need inkscape: attributes in <svg> for scale factor and preferred length units. That will require changes in a lot of places I think.
Yes, I explored using the meters setting for some map work. My take is that the unit system as it currently stands is wholy inadequate in general. For instance, if you're doing maps on the scale of km's or feet, you're out of luck. Similarly, doing a convert-on-save may not be the ideal solution.
An approach I had been thinking on was to have an automatic unit scaling that occurs extrinsically to the document. The items inside the doc would be measured in some sort of abstract points, plus carry a scaling factor parameter in its def's. This way, we keep the notion of units completely abstracted from the document internals, and are handled at the display level.
One area where some awareness of the display units may be needed is in the object import/export command. E.g., if you're making a landscaping map at 1 pt : 1 ft and wish to import a tree that was done at the scale 1 pt : 1 cm, you'd probably want the system to do the ft/cm unit conversion and rescale appropriately.
Anyway, since I feel we need a much better unit system in there, I'm of the opinion that trimming back the current units handling code for simplicity is probably the right move. Also, I think it'd be wise to review the SVG spec as well as other scalable drawing tools to see if there are better approaches for handling units.
Bryce