Aaron Spike wrote:

...

I propose we alter the default document to be viewed at a 100% scale so that all tools visually balance the way they would on the output media.

Would an alternative be to increase the default font size? I picture the most common use of text to be large text for posters etc.

This would be most useful with some cleverness added to the behavior of resizing text (and grouped objects containing text):

When I resize drawing elements because I didn't start off with the right canvas size, the resulting high-decimal point size of the fonts (e.g. 50.582pt) becomes a detail that I want to fix (perhaps irrationally).

I would appreciate an optional 'grid' of increments thought the font size space, so if I was looking to monitor my resizing to 'snap' to an integer or specific decimal font dimension, I could do it. This should probably be a keypress-driven mode, and act like a grid snap during the resizing maneuver.

The example would be if you have a draft graphical logo containing primary text elements, and you are asked to 'resize the logo to 60pt font', meaning resize everything so that the text in that graphical logo is 60pt.

Would an alternative be to increase the default font size? I picture the most common use of text to be large text for posters etc.

I fully agree with this, and the same holds for the grid size, for the same reasons.

If you don't like it, change it in Doc Prefs. You are not a newbie.

ralf

In my experience, the main Inkscape usage is not printing, so i question if the default empty document should really be a full page

but you're not a beginner, so please step back :) even I who knows the program uses it only with A4, and mostly for printing.

I observed newbies not understanding the need to change the page size or not knowing how to do it - for example at OCAL we receive from time to time tiny images in a full A4 canvas (this is not good for automatic generation of thumbnails).

but it would surely be possible to get the bounding box of the drawings and use that?

ralf

Hi alltogether,

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 09:18:31AM +0100, Ralf Stephan wrote:

...

In my experience, the main Inkscape usage is not printing, so i question if the default empty document should really be a full page

but you're not a beginner, so please step back :) even I who knows the program uses it only with A4, and mostly for printing.

Me too ;-) And I think that we could go a stepp further and use the standeard papersize the user has on its computer. While I was a bit lazy to express this opinion until now, a bug report I received in debian's BTS triggered this email. Daniel Kahn Gillmor writes:

Inkscape is great! my only complaint is that it always launches by default with A4 paper (yes, i'm an American... sigh).

when i change /usr/share/inkscape/default.svg by hand, new versions of inkscape overwrite my changes.

it seems like there are enough clues available in debian to pick the system's preferred default paper size and set up /usr/share/inkscape/default.svg with symlinks or something during package installation.

possible options include:

• LC_PAPER (locale's paper settings)
• debconf:libpaper/defaultpaper (at the moment only requested by
• libpaper1)
• /etc/papersize or /usr/bin/paperconf

These last two come from the libpaper1 package, which maybe would mean inkscape would have an additional dependency (though it's not a heavyweight one).

Even fancier would be for inkscape to decide which package is the default at runtime using /usr/bin/paperconf or LC_PAPER or something similar. This would let different users on the same system have their own preferred default paper sizes just by setting environment variables.

While most of his suggestions are highly debian specific, I guess there must be a possibility to get the default locale and adjust the default document size accordingly.

Probably I'll file a RFE for that.

Thanks,

Wolfi

PS: The full report is at http://bugs.debian.org/342388