On Fri, 2013-09-20 at 16:45 -0400, Matthew Petroff wrote:

I've enjoyed my work this summer and would like to thank the Inkscape community for the opportunity. I plan on staying involved with the project for the foreseeable future.

Matthew, thanks so much for your involvement. It's always great to see new GSoC people stay involved and great to see new features come in like the units work :-)

Martin Owens,

On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 04:45:39PM -0400, Matthew Petroff wrote:

I've now merged phase two of my GSoC project, unit support improvements, with the trunk.

I've enjoyed my work this summer and would like to thank the Inkscape community for the opportunity. I plan on staying involved with the project for the foreseeable future.

http://www.mpetroff.net/archives/2013/09/20/finishing-google-summer-of-code/

-Matthew

Having once looked into the units cleanup work, I know that was a challenging task to undertake. Thanks so much for taking it on this summer; I look forward to using the improvements!

One question I have, purely as a likely user of your work... My main use for Inkscape these days is to do drafting designs for my woodworking plans. For this, I typically have to scale the units so my real-world project fits onto an 8.5x11 page of paper. You mentioned in your blog post about twiddling units.xml to set pixel-to-lenth conversion factors; can this be used for my scaling purposes?

Also, as you were doing this work, did you by chance give thought to how the UI might be made to work for setting scaling factors? This is something I've pondered for some time, but don't have any great insights. But I can describe as a user, how I'd need it:

Usually when I'm first starting a drafting project, I have a rough idea of the overall size of the object I'm drawing. I'll create a rectangle to represent the item, perhaps serving as a rough bounding box, before adding any detail. At this particular point it would be handy to be able to say, "I want this box to be sixty two inches long by thirty four high", and have inkscape take care of calculating the resulting conversion factors, grid spacings, etc.

Presently, I need to do a bit of math to find a good scaling factor, and manually fiddle the grid settings so lines will snap on the inch (and quarter-inch when zoomed).

Anyway, thanks again for your help on your units improvement project, this woodworker very much appreciates it. :-)

Bryce