On 8/4/05, Kevin Wixson <kevin@...738...> wrote:
Strictly speaking, can't the same effect as Division can be achieved with two copies of the two objects and performing Difference on one set and Intersection on and the other?
Right, just the same as your proposed command can be achieved by several duplications and divisions.
of convenience and productivity without any other real obvious reason. Why not just expand that idea to include the leftover area of the top shape as well, thus making it possible to simply select and deleted the unwanted bits? Isn't that also productive, or even more so? Otherwise, the method of making two copies and preforming Exclusion on one and Intersection on the other set is necessary, which is not as productive as just deleting the unwanted section to achieve the same result as the current Division command.
No, the "use case" should be something like that: I have such and such practical situation, and I want to achieve this and this practical result. I can give such use cases for the regular division we have but not for your proposed "extended division". Can you?
I use this kind of feature all the time in other programs, and where what I need is just the two of the three bits, I erase what I don't need. Much easier, I think, since I also don't have to worry about what the stacking order is.
It's subjective. You don't have to worry about z-order, but I don't have to worry about deleting unwanted bits. Are your worries worse than mine? I don't know.
But if you need a compelling use case, consider making a stained glass image effect, where you're cutting things apart so you can give them different fills, and you certainly don't want to be losing bits of the shapes in the process.
Just recently I helped someone on Jabber to do just that. He had a shape which represented the frames of the stained glass mosaic, and I explained how to put a rect under that shape, divide it by the frame shape, and then paint each divided part by its own color. I absolutely don't see how extra division of the frame shape itself could be useful here.