Hi,
I just committed a change to SVN (rev. #17022) which allows the user to convert rectangles and 3D boxes to a collection of guidelines that are aligned along these objects' edges.
Originally, this was a stab at something in the direction of RFE #172136 (in particular, it was only meant to work for 3D boxes). But since I'm not familiar yet with grid infrastructure I thought that instead of a grid it would be easier to create a couple of guidelines from a box, which can then be used as a basis for 3D based drawings. Not as functional as a 3D box based grid but better than nothing.
Then it occurred to me that it may be even more useful to convert *rectangles* to guides because in this way it becomes much easier to create guidelines in specified positions/constellations (imagine applying it to rotated or skewed rectangles). So I implemented this as well and added an additional menu entry "Object->Objects to guides" which allows conversion to guidlines of any rects or 3D boxes in the current selection.
Now I have some questions.
1) I'm not sure if this kind of change should occur during Frost phase (I couldn't ask for an exception before because I hadn't thought of it at that time). But since IMHO it's an extremely useful yet very lightweight change - even if a couple of files were adapted - and I don't see any way in which this can possibly break things, I committed it anyway. If it is not desired and should be held back until after 0.46, please feel free to revert it.
2) Originally I added a button to the 3D box toolbar which allowed conversion of selected boxes to guides. After providing this option for rects, I also added this button to the rect toolbar, but then I thought it might also make sense in (at least) Selector tool, so I decided not to clutter the toolbars and removed the buttons altogether in favor of the menu entry. Do you think there is any value for such buttons?
3) I added the keyboard shortcut 'Shift+G' for conversion to guides in Rect, 3D Box and Selector tools. Do you think this is appropriate (I personally find it very handy to have a quickly accessible shortcut in these tools) or should there rather be a global shortcut associated with the corresponding verb? What would be an appropriate one?
Thanks, Max
P.S.: Release Notes will be updated in case this change is accepted for 0.46. BTW, I'm aware that I still need to update them for the 3D box tool and other things. Will do so as soon as possible.