Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
To me "preserving shape" means "preserving shape" not "preserving type of segments": the path after deleting nodes is adjusted so that it looks similar to the original path.
I recognize that the previous behavior can be convenient, but it's quirky: what you obtain depends on whether any of the surrounding segments has a handle extended, and to obtain a fit to shape, you need to minimally extend one of the handles. Isn't it better to explicitly say what you want with Ctrl+Del? (By the way, previously Ctrl+Del on a node between two linear segments did exactly the same thing as Del; there was no way to get the shape readjustment behavior on such nodes.)
Regards, Krzysztof
Ok, let me say that we have different ideas on what "preserve shape" means. This means that we should discuss on this, rather than taking it as a starting point. And also, it's something that probably needs more than our two opinions to be heard.
I think that what you say is conceptually wrong: a segment is different than a straight curve. If you think that a path is _always_ made of curves, then your proposal could be considered correct. But a path _is not_ always made of curves. The paths I work with are not made of curves but of segments. Then if deleting a node converts my paths to curves I can't consider this as "preserving shape" because you are also changing the constructing structure of the object I'm working with. It's like converting a circle to a path: it's not a circle as it doesn't have a center and a radius anymore, also if the "shape" is almost the same. With this assumption, I consider that having del and ctrl-del doing the same thing on segments is perfectly coherent as there's no way to preserve the shape of segments if you delete a node (if the node is not aligned with its neighbours, of course). And also, defining the current behavior as "preserving shape" as from your point of view is very subjective: draw a triangle or a square and delete a node... do you really consider this as "preserving shape"?
More, what you say is: - if you press a single key, Inkscape is going to change the type of the object you are working with, i.e. changing it's properties; - if you want Inkscape to preserve the object type and properties, you need to press a combination of two keys. This seems to me very couterintuitive, and also very annoying as the combination ctrl-del needs either to use both hands (i.e. leaving the mouse) or using the left hand in the right part of the keyboard. This means I'm going to be _always_ very uncomfortable with deleting nodes for the advantage of who? And I'm never going to use the ctrl-alt click or whatever to delete nodes because the only way I have to do it is using ctrl-del. I can only consider this a lack of functionality, or maybe simply a bad implementation.
And if this all is not enough, all the programs I know (they are not so many but I suppose they are a good reference) leave segments as segments when deleting nodes and this is probably what users expect (but I definitely need to hear more opinions on this). If so, is there a good reason to have Inkscape behave differently?
Solution? I have two: 1) the old behavior: segments are left segments and curves' shape is preserved; and you always have the possibility to convert segments to straight curves if you really need the current (strange) behavior; everybody happy: why not? 2) wait for more feedback: if you start hearing people complain maybe it's better to review the choice, otherwise either everything is fine or maybe not so many people are using Inkscape for technical drawings.
Regards Luca