On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 10:05:46PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
FYI: I just had a friend upgrade to trunk to get the 0.91 unit behavior. He actually needs this for work to do a very accurate technical design. In other words: the viewBox change is /awesome/. It is very unfortunate that there are bugs related to it. But backing-off completely is a huge step back. I thought most annoying bugs are related to changing the units for an existing document. Is that correct? If so, all we have to do is warn people about that, e.g. with an extra dialog telling people that changing document unit only works for fresh documents or 0.91 documents. Documents from earlier versions of Inkscape may have troubles.
-1 for warning dialogs. Clutter, plus no one bothers reading them.
I'm afraid we will run into the exact same problems when we postpone this change to the next release. My intuition tells me that there is no general way to properly upgrade a "broken" Inkscape pre-0.91 document that works in all cases. But I may be wrong of course.
Delaying it to next release adds time we can use to fix the problems.
For example, hiding the "set document units" functionality would paper over the problem but breaks several use cases. To fix that we could add a "Display units" feature that lets the user work in the GUI with a different set of units than are stored in the document. That's not the sort of feature we want to be putting in the week before release but is certainly something we could do in a 0.92 timeframe.
That's just one example, I'm sure other bugs in the list could similarly benefit from having extra development time to work on.
In general, I'd much rather land the unit changes when we can demonstrate significant new improvements to users, especially if it brings risk of bugs or breaking use cases. Right now it sounds like the benefits it brings are being swamped by the bugs.
-Johan
On 20-11-2014 21:09, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
Hi,
We need to decide what to do about a whole set of bugs brought on by the current behavior when changing inkscape:document-unit.[1] In 0.48 this attribute only effected what values were shown in the GUI. All values inside the SVG file were still stored as 'user-units' ('px' in CSS styles). In 0.91 changing inkscape:document-unit form the 'Page' tab of the Document Properties dialog changes the 'viewBox' and attempts to change all the length units inside the SVG file (rectangle width/height, etc.) to match. I can see how this could be useful but it is incredibly difficult to do right as illustrated by the number of bugs reported (and the many more I am sure have not been reported, think, for example of all the length values inside filters).
Question: How easy would it be to revert back to the 0.48 behavior for 0.91?
Tav
[1] http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Units_In_Inkscape:_Document_Unit_Cha...