On Wed, 12 May 2004, Bryce Harrington wrote:
[snip]
I've always been bugged by this too. Yes you're right that it seems to be basing the snap coordinate on the bounding box rather than the snap point as you'd expect. Perhaps this was done in a desire to allow shapes to fit within the grid boundaries. For instance, I can easily see how if you're making an artistic drawing, you might want to see things snap to their "real" edges rather than to their node points. However, as you note, for technical drawing it does not work out right, since the "centerlines" are the important thing, not the line widths.
Absolutely. I think the "artistic / technical" is probably the best distinction.
Perhaps an idea would be to provide an option in the grid/snap dialog for the following snapping behaviors:
Snap objects to their: Grid Guides outermost edges [ ] [X] node points (default) [X] [ ] center point [ ] [X] ( pivot point [ ] [ ] ) moment of inertia [ ] [ ] ( connection points [ ] [ ] )
Yes. I think this is the idea I had come around to, as well.
[snip details of particular snap behaviours]
That's fine. Once the structure is in place we can add snap behaviours to our hearts' contents.
I think that the importance of node-point-based snapping increases in importance when we have non-square grids. I know Nathan has long been interested in adding iso, hex, etc. grid types, and the bounding-box style of snapping will just feel wrong with those kinds of grids.
I'm sure.
Creating a bounding box from the node points rather than the outer edges may solve it, but it'd be interesting to know if it'd be possible to snap to the node points themselves. For example, wouldn't it be nice if stars could be snapped to the grid on their points?
That's true. I think we can achieve that if we improve the code that generates a list of snap points.
Regarding star snapping behavior, notice that when you initially draw the star, it snaps to its center, but when you move it it snaps only to its bounding box. Erf! It probably ought to consistently do one or the other, with an option to achieve the other effect.
Absolutely. The inconsistency is the annoying thing, I think.
Also, on the topic of weird things happening when you resize stroked boxes, another technical drawing 'mis-feature' worth figuring out a good alternative solution for is how the stroke width is scaled. Normally when doing a technical drawing you will want to scale some boxes but maintain a consistent line width on everything. It would be valuable to have an option in preferences to control whether stroke width is scaled with object scaling or not.
Couldn't agree more. Inkscape preferences -> Transforms -> Scale stroke width
;-)
Carl