Based on current hotkey conventions in Inkscape, I have deduced what may be the most intuitive hotkey combo for the rotation function:

Hold-Spacebar+right-mouse-click-drag - Rotation with snapping to 1 degree precision (integer values only).

Hold-Spacebar+shift+right-mouse-click-drag - 5 degree snapping rotation (integer values only).

Hold-Spacebar+alt+right-mouse-click-drag - Precision rotation with with (fractional degrees possible).

This is of course based on the current canvas-grab hotkey which is the spacebar.

Intuitively it makes sense to be able to rotate as well as part of this 2D navigation of the canvas.

It would be useful to show rotation proportional to the center of the view from where the cursor is, allowing the user to manually control the speed of rotation, based on the distance from the centerpoint of the view.

In essence, it would be like pinning the canvas with a finger in the middle of the view, and using a second finger to drag the rest of the paper around that centerpoint.

Since real-time canvas rotation is not possible currently, I recommend the following to reflect the new angle of the canvas in real-time as the user holds the hotkey combo and drags:

The crosshair would be shown whenever the spacebar and right mouse button are held down together, and it would also be useful to show two lines:

1. A "new rotation" line connecting the cursor and the crosshair, labeled with what the new canvas rotation will be in degrees (global rotation value).

2. A "previous rotation" line representing the previous canvas rotation, marked with the global degrees (static), and an arc, connecting the new rotation line, and labeled with a readout of the *difference* in degrees between the old value and new value (local rotation increase/decrease).

I believe this would be very handy in providing enough information to rotate the canvas without the need to show the canvas rotation in real time (which of course would be a nice thing to implement in the future.

Thoughts? Anyone want some visuals for this?

-C

On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Jabiertxo Arraiza Cenoz <jabier.arraiza@...2893...> wrote:

Hi Martin.

On Sat, 2016-10-15 at 01:13 -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
> Hi Jabier.
>
> My best thinking for the shortcuts is that it should work a bit like
> the zoom. Undo and redo zooms, but undo and redo rotational setting.
> This way I could work on something, rotate it back to look at it,
> rotate it forwards to continue working on it. And so on.

Zoom has a tool to alow more things than undo/redo shortcuts to me we
need also a shortcut rotation to 45 or 90 forward and backward

> The bottom bar in the preview is too big, this is probably a
> packaging
> bug.

Not realy a packaging bug is because the 2 widgets -zoom and rotate-
are unstyled and his height are too big by default, maybe we can also
put one before the other, but we redice the info text size (but we have
2 lines now!) or change his padding.

> But whichever visual widget we choose, it shouldn't take away from
> drag rotation. On canvas editing is an important part of what
> inkscape
> does really well.

Dont understand well.

Cheers, Jabier.

> Martin,
>
> On Sat, 2016-10-15 at 01:51 +0200, Jabiertxo Arraiza Cenoz wrote:
> > Hi CR. I do your idea, like it, give too much control than slider,
> > thanks. Attached a preview.
> >
> > Things to do:
> >
> > * Define shortcuts and his function -0º based or current angle
> > based-
> > * Format widget to show number + º
> > * Give style to widgets to remove padding top and button. Anyway I
> > think the bar become biger :(
> >
> > I just commit the new code to launchpad.
> >
> > Cheers, Jabier.
> >
> >
> >
> > >
> > > I think we could do this quite easily, without changing the
> > > interface
> > > too
> > > much.
> > > We already have an editable zoom readout. How about adding a
> > > Rotation
> > > field
> > > under it?
> > > Like this (file preview attached).
> > >
> > > User can use mousewheel easily to rotate by 1 degree, just mouse
> > > over
> > > field
> > > and use mousewheel, or shift+mousewheel to rotate 5deg
> > > increments,
> > > or
> > > ctrl+mousewheel to rotate .1 degree increments.
> > >
> > > Thoughts?
> > >
> > > -C
> > >
> > > On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 9:04 PM, Jabiertxo Arraiza Cenoz <
> > > jabier.arraiza@...2893...> wrote:
> > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Hi all.
> > > >
> > > > I have a work to our UI group, It's about the feature described
> > > > in
> > >
> > > this
> > > >
> > > > video [1] - rotate workspace
> > > >
> > > > There is a recent discussion higly recomend to read [2]:
> > > >
> > > > We need to define the way to handle workspace rotation:
> > > >
> > > > There is no realtime rotation, so we need to select an angle
> > > > and
> > >
> > > start
> > > >
> > > > redraw, so the option to a tool to it become a bad idea, except
> > > > we
> > >
> > > have
> > > >
> > > > a pixel preview of current workspace to "phantom" the rotation
> > > > as
> > > > Martin point, but not sure about it
> > > >
> > > > The rotation is done by the current workspace center, no
> > > > problem
> > >
> > > where
> > > >
> > > > the document are on it.
> > > >
> > > > We need to define:
> > > > * WIDGETS
> > > > * Shortcuts
> > > >
> > > > 1: Shortcuts.
> > > > only one direction, a modiffier [XXX] rotate by prefs rotate
> > > > steps
> > >
> > > with
> > > >
> > > > [XXX] modifier rotate in 45 or 90 degree from 0 could be a
> > > > option
> > > >
> > > > 2:Widget.
> > > > Two options: Popup from button or toolbar, there is some
> > > > discussion
> > > > about in [2] I want it defined to know the way to take, both
> > > > have
> > > > things good and bad.
> > > >
> > > > [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utFQve7ofJk
> > > > [2] http://inkscape.13.x6.nabble.com/Workspace-rotation-td49774
> > > > 87
> > > > .h
> > >
> > > tml
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Cheers, Jabier.
> > > > ------------------------------------------------------------
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