bulia byak wrote:
Sorry for taking it for granted that this feature is not used. But I honestly tried to find the users before removing it :) I announced my plans to eliminate it on this list a couple months ago. Also I read quite a lot of tutorials and Inkscape-related discussions, and nowhere was this feature even mentioned.
Oh, I haven't been following this list all that religiously :-/
I can understand that few people use it but then it's not an apparent feature, as you say. The majority of users are still getting to grips with Inkscape's more fundamental tools.
Personally I find it quite counterintuitive. In other constrained transform modes, it is at least easy to guess what the constraint is even if you've run into it accidentally. This one just looks like it's broken.
A status bar hint might help. But I think your assertion is overstated. It's not hard to deduce what it does.
I also don't know an equivalent of this in other vector editors.
I don't use other vector editors, just Inkscape. So it's not a persuasive argument from my point of view. Inkscape has different goals to other editors anyway.
Why can't you instead just zoom in to fine-scale and then zoom back out? Or just use Alt+> and Alt+< to scale? The only shortcoming of Alt+<> compared to mouse dragging is that it scales around center whereas with mouse, you can scale to one side.
Alt+<> isn't fine enough, nor does it offer non-aspect preserving scale.
Myself, especially when I do artistic graphics, I almost exclusively use keyboard for scaling. In this kind of graphics, your typical goals are not to achieve some specific width/height but to "make this thing slightly smaller" or "make that thing somewhat larger". In my brain, such goals much more easily translate into pressing Alt+< or > or Ctrl+> than into a "grab a handle and drag" kind of action.
I think it's just a matter of practice. I have trained myself over recent months to use Alt+drag and it turned out to be pretty handy. Common situations I use it:
* Making curves line up tidily, especially to get the outlines of different paths to overlap. * Correcting for antialiasing blurriness. I can pixel align some things using the coordinates on the toolbar, but sometimes (when elements extend outside of the box I'm trying to align) slow scaling is more convenient. * Fine work on generally turns out to be much easier given the extra precision.
I've never found zooming in to be a particularly convenient alternative anyway: swapping to another tool and losing the wide-angle overview just to get more precision has always lost out to instant fine control at a lower zoom. This is especially true when you can't fit all of the scale handles onto the zoomed viewport at once. Now though, zooming in to do fine work can take on the order of minutes to render the window when using Gaussian blur, and be unusably slow even then, so it's simply unacceptable to work that way.
I accept there's a desire to cram in more features and I'm happy to adapt my method of working if anyone can suggest an alternative. The best workaround I can think of is using a duplicate window at a different zoom, but that's not exactly convenient because of the duplicated chrome, selection and inconvenient window focus. Would it be easy to create an ad-hoc "magnifier" window that stays on top, is editable, and shares selection with the parent viewport? Perhaps this could be created or refocused using a modifier with the zoom tool. It could also approximate the gaussian blur to make it easy to work with.
Dan