I'm in favor of emulating the Corel Draw approach to snapping. It's one of the features I liked there (the ones I didn't like included the fact that it's hard to create an alpha gradient). Xara approach (snap indicator in the statusbar) is just completely bogus, please don't do this.
Diederik van Lierop wrote:
That's indeed an elegant way to create some more flexibility. If however this is only to select what we snap _to_, then we could still use something that gives us more control of what we snap _from_. For the latter we could still use Johan's proposal.
In Corel Draw this is handled by allowing one to drag a node or the center of an object in the selector tool. The thing you're dragging is automatically considered to be the only thing you want to snap, even though the entire object moves. Same with rotation, you can rotate by dragging a node. In addition to being easier to use, this approach reduces the mathematical complexity of snapping, because you have 1xN distances to compute instead of MxN distances. I think this is a very intelligent solution.
With regards to visual snapping indication, Corel Draw does it right too: a small static crosshair is being displayed, and additionally a small textual description of what is being snapped to appears (e.g. "node", "center", "quarter" (of a circle), "line", "baseline" (of a text), "intersection" etc.
Regards, Krzysztof Kosiński