Hi Guys,
Testing this recent build. Inkscape 0.48+devel r11870
So far:
New stuff: - Love the Symbol manager. It will greatly inprove productivity. I wish that a similar thing could be done with first level grouped objects and using the same CTRL+select for objects within that. Ehm,.. a small note saying Use CTRL+C to copy might help though, as I tried clicking and dragging first. BTW. If it would follow the rule of always paste in place, it would be a great help in templating designs.
- The new text edit docker is great! Would have liked to see a list of fonts used in the document though, so you can more easily select from the fonts already chosen, find out missing fonts etc.. Could that be added to a third tab?
Old stuff: - It's the old clip an object and get to select the object rather than the clipped area bug. So my clip displays the size of the clipped object rather than the clipping area. Now really...that is something that needs fixing.
BTW,.. using the create copy of clipping object to create area rather than the default. Releasing the clip doesn't recreate a copy of the clipping object on the screen, clippath is left in defs. So I guess the function has to be extended with a function to copy that node back to the correct z-order of the objects.
Question: - Does Inkscape already support SVG font display (Tiny, not Full)? I know Mozilla doesn't support it and probably never will, but I really would love to use them regardless. I have several use cases in mind that are uniquely possible using SVG fonts and don't care if users will have to use "Modern" browsers like ahem.. the rest. Now we can create Glyphs, but I am not sure if it is possible to display them yet.
I'll do more testing during the next few weeks, if there's anything you'd like me to pay attention to, please tell as there are a lot of things, new and old.
On the Units discussion:
The idea is simple Inkscape uses px as units. In the config we can set the amount of pixels per unit, so we end up with 90dpi (standard screenres in 2000) or just set it to 10px per mm or whatever. That way poor buggers like me that design in mm for print and need to get this used on screen won't have to use a calculator to convert the x,y locations with a 6 decimal precision and make these horrid choices on how to handle the half a pixel sizes. Using 3.50xxxx etc. really does my head in at times. Nowhere in the SVG specs does it implicitly say how many PPI to use, it's arbitrary. However, as it was concieved to be used as a screen format, it became pixels per Inch to follow the industry standard. The latter we can blame on Silicon Valley being the place where the early stages of IT were conducted rather than Bletchly Park or Paris.
The whole zoom factor is not the issue. It's having a SVG document that has been converted from mm to Inches and then PPI. If I have a 85x55mm businesscard, I'd love to be able to read that in the SVG file as 850x550 px rather than 309.2xxxxx x 190.1xxxxx. That way I can more easily create guidelines and additional objects on screen in my web application without having to calculate every friggin measurement and ending up with those quirky estimations. Maybe Inkscape development isn't always a bliss, but I think with little effort Development using Inkscape can be made a bliss. Adding a setting for Pixels per Unit will greatly improve my sense of bliss at least.
For others it may also be a handy way to solve their problems they encounter with scaling if there was an additional recalculator function added to this scaling. That would be a nice extension maybe. "Change/Convert pixels per unit"... Oh joy! I could reset tonnes of hardly usable SVG code with that..!
Well,.. Cheers
Jelle