J.B.C.Engelen@...1578... schrieb:
Hello all,
- Angled Guidelines
Now, Inkscape also provides angled guidelines! Double click on a guide to set its angle.
Great work! This was an often requested feature, and I'm sure it will be extremely useful for a lot of users.
One suggestion: Would it be hard to add live preview and/or an option to pin the dialog (analogously to how the effects dialogs work)? Or maybe it would be enough to interactively adjust the angle/position when Enter is pressed in one of the entry fields. BTW, now that I tried it again, Enter does already work in the first entry field (for the horizontal coordinate) but not in the other ones. However, it closes the dialog. Would it be possible/desirable to make it adjust the guideline but not close the dialog so that further adjustments can be made?
And here is a minor bug: In the first line of the dialog (which contains the description, saying "Moving ... degree guideline at ..."), the sign of the angle is wrong (i.e., when it's a 30 degree guideline it says -30 degrees).
As for general usability, I find it a bit inconvenient to have to think of a guideline as attached at a certain point on the canvas. Of course, this is the way it is represented mathematically, but for me it's simply a line with no beginning or end. In particular, none of its points is distinguished from the others in any visible way. So I wonder if this can be reflected in the dialog, i.e., get rid of the "anchor point" of the guideline (or at least to provide an option to neglect it). Haven't been able so far to come up with a good idea, though.
Or will this become a non-issue once there is increased mouse support for angled guidelines? Are there any plans for this yet? Here are two possibilities that came to my mind:
1) Make guidelines rotateable (e.g., when a modifier key is pressed). Don't know around which point it should rotate, but maybe one of the intersections with the border of the visible area, or the midpoint between these intersections, would be convenient.
2) When double-clicking (or Shift-clicking or shift-double-clicking or whatever) a guideline, show its anchor point (much like clicking twice in the selector tool shows the rotation center), which can then be dragged to any position. Also, dragging a guideline with the anchor being visible should result in a rotation about this point rather than a parallel movement.
This is just offhand, though, and I don't know how it's handled in other programs. Maybe there are much better approaches.
Anyway, many thanks again to Johan and Merry Christmas to all. :)
Max