On 2010-12-04 19:53, Felipe Sanches wrote:
I have been using inkscape a lot recently and I noticed that sometimes it can become very annoying to select svg elements that are in the middle of a pile of other elements.
Thus, I was thinking that we could have a key-combo that would break appart all "hidden" shapes to allow you to select one of them, and after that, all shapes would be places back in their correct places. Sometimes I do something similar to that by hand, but an automated UI feature would be very useful. Also, it would be solely a visualization mode, not actualy modifying elements in the SVG DOM.
I'd like to have some feedback on this idea. thanks,
I like the idea, also to be able to select items that are not necessarily on top of each other, but are very close (this can be very frustrating, requiring very precise mousing and/or zooming).
For shapes that are not on top of each other I think it should just be like a kind of magnifier glass, but how would you propose to "pull apart" completely covered shapes? I could imagine something could be done that's similar to certain graph layout algorithms. But it would have to be pretty fast.
The menu idea mentioned by Michael might also be an option, but I have some (although it was brief) experience with something like that and found it a bit inconvenient, especially as you have to make a coupling between the text in the menu and the objects in your image. Thumbnails would help, but if they're as small as icons they might be of limited use, if they get larger it may just be more natural to have a zoom-like behaviour. Also, such a menu solution could make it a bit more awkward to also handle selecting non-overlapping (or partially overlapping), but very close, shapes.