On 7/9/07, Daniel Pope <mauve@...1559...> wrote:
Argh! No! I use this a lot!
Alt is important to do sub-pixel tweaking. It's also consistent with using Alt+Cursors to nudge by a single screen pixel.
Sorry for taking it for granted that this feature is not used. But I honestly tried to find the users before removing it :) I announced my plans to eliminate it on this list a couple months ago. Also I read quite a lot of tutorials and Inkscape-related discussions, and nowhere was this feature even mentioned.
Personally I find it quite counterintuitive. In other constrained transform modes, it is at least easy to guess what the constraint is even if you've run into it accidentally. This one just looks like it's broken. I also don't know an equivalent of this in other vector editors.
Without Alt-scaling, the tolerance for the mouse pointer before dragging begins will now mean that it's nearly impossible to scale by a fractional amount.
Why can't you instead just zoom in to fine-scale and then zoom back out? Or just use Alt+> and Alt+< to scale? The only shortcoming of Alt+<> compared to mouse dragging is that it scales around center whereas with mouse, you can scale to one side. But I don't this it matters much for artistic drawings, especially for small scale adjustments.
Myself, especially when I do artistic graphics, I almost exclusively use keyboard for scaling. In this kind of graphics, your typical goals are not to achieve some specific width/height but to "make this thing slightly smaller" or "make that thing somewhat larger". In my brain, such goals much more easily translate into pressing Alt+< or > or Ctrl+> than into a "grab a handle and drag" kind of action.