On 27-5-2012 5:50, John Smith wrote:
Is there a reason for the differences between the UI for Grid and Guides ?
Currently: a) Guides are visually "on" by default - but there are no actual guides. Menu "View->Guides" initially does nothing - since there is no guide to show/hide. b) Grids are visually "off" by default. Menu "View->Grid" creates and shows a grid if there is no grid. c) Guides are created/deleted via the Edit menu d) Grids are created/deleted via the Document Properties dialog.
Comments in the code refer to some sort of backwards compatibility
// show guides if not specified, for backwards compatibility // hide guides if not specified, for backwards compatibility
Propose to change the Guide UI to match the Grid UI as below.
- Guides would be "off" by default (if not specified in the doc)
(Note it will very likely not change behavior of documents that are already created and have guides: Inkscape will not use default settings for those documents because the visibility setting is stored in SVG after turning guides on/off or dragging a guide from the ruler, which I suppose means it is set explicitly in SVG for every document with guides)
Changing the default will not make any difference in behavior. :-)
Visibility is turned on upon creating a guide by dragging from the ruler. (!!!) This is good. However, creating guides from an object bbox or from page edges does not turn on visibility. This should be fixed I think. It is confusing/annoying to not have guides show up when you click the "create guides from object/page" menu entries.
For the people who use guides a lot: do you indeed like guides to become visible whenever you create them? (I would think so, but one never knows)
If so, the default setting only makes sense for documents that have guides, but have not visibility setting define; a very rare event.
- Toggling "View->Guides" would create guides (same as "Edit->Create
Guides Around the page") if there is no existing guide. 3. Add a button : "Document Properties->Guides->Remove Guides" 4. Remove menu item : "Edit->Create Guides Around the page" 5. Remove menu item : "Edit->Delete All Guides"
Point 2. I really don't like. The other points I cannot judge too well.
Recently, a GSoC project started working on guides, including adding a much improved Document Properties tab. Please hold off with big changes to guides and evaluate the UI after GSoC has finished.
Cheers, Johan