On 04/04/2009 07:50 PM, A.J. Carter wrote:
In Inkscape you don't grab a rectangle by its corner, but instead you grab the full rectangle including all of its four corners. Any corner might snap, not just the one you tried to grab. So you don't really hold the corner as in CorelDraw. This difference is quite subtle. In the nightly builds however there is this option to snap only the node (of the item that's being dragged) closest to the mouse pointer, or if you think you'd like something in between then there's the slider to set a weight factor, buy you probably already knew that.
Yes, but isn't selecting near to the corner _with_ the "snap closest to mouse pointer" enabled then the same thing as picking up by the corner itself?
Yes, you're right about that of course. To the user that doesn't make a difference, I guess I got my head stuck in the code ;-)
If so, with this option enabled, a pre-snap indicator would certainly be possible at the cursor position.
That would then be a SOURCE-pre-snap-indicator.
The pre-snap indicator is especially needed in cases where there's nothing there yet, for example when creating new shapes.
.. and this would then be called the TARGET-pre-snap-indicator
But it doesn't hurt to display both in the tooltip, does it? The text is a bit long in some cases, but that's all. It might be hard to discern whether it's the node or the boundingbox that is snapping when only a marker is shown. Now it's made explicit in the tooltip's text.
I agree it shouldn't hurt in principle, but when I select the shape to move as far I'm concerned the pre-'snap point' has already been selected when I picked it up, and so I'm only looking for the other snap when I position it, and it needs kind of a double take when two pop up.
This all comes down to whether the "snap to the point nearest the cursor" option is active, or not. If it's on only the end of the snap is required at final positioning, otherwise yes both are needed.
Perhaps my difficulty is why would you ever want it to snap away from the cursor - surely if you wanted to snap at the opposite side of the shape, you'd pick it up somewhere there wouldn't you ?
Yes, that's right. The main (or even only) use of this is when multiple snap sources are available which are very close together, at one single side of the shape (for example the bounding box corner and the node of a rectangle). The mouse pointer might be covering all of them, which makes it hard to accurately select the desired snap source. When using "snap closest to mouse pointer only", you will have to zoom in to reliably control the snap source. Using Inkscape's default snapping mode however, Inkscape will first snap considering all candidate snap sources, then show you which has snapped, and finally allow you to change which snaps by moving the mouse a little. I've got used to that and like it that way best, but I can imagine not everyone feels the same. That's why it's been made configurable :-)
Diederik