On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 10:19:12PM -0500, MenTaLguY wrote:

...

We can investigate whether it makes sense to separate them in 0.41, but for now we need to fix the tools etc to treat such objects and layers as immutable, at least as far as the mouse tools are

concerned.

Brisgeek was saying that offhand he couldn't think of a situation

where

he'd want to mark objects as read-only/immutable (other than having

the

whole diagram be immutable, as in inkview).

Brisgeek and other drawing people, can you think a bit more about

this?

My thought are that if I lock a layer, I shouldn't be able to do anything to that layers' objects until it is unlocked (other than change visibility, which is a layer level option). And my reasoning goes based on experience with other vector drawing apps... essentially it's the expected behavior.

To me (as a non-artist) it doesn't seem very useful to prevent modification with the mouse tool of already-selected objects, as it's easy to deselect them if you've just made them insensitve. Whereas it does seem useful to be able to modify things that you've gone to the trouble of selecting despite them being insensitive.

To tell you the truth, more artists will end up using Inkscape than non-artists. And it is quite useful to be able to know that you can lock a layer, do a rubberband across the canvas to select all objects of my unlocked layers and not have to worry about anything in my locked layer getting selected as well. In Illustrator & Freehand (as well as others) that is the behavior.

Also, as I just tested in Illustrator, if you have an object selected and lock the layer it's on, it is automatically deselected (as you can't modify something that is locked). That makes sense to me as well. If I click lock, it's because I'm don't want to edit that layer (or anything on it) and it saves me a click with the having to deselect manually (minor, but functionally it makes sense with how lock works in Illustrator).

I'd note that it's less work for it to mean merely insensitive rather than insensitive and immutable from mouse tools. I'd suggest that at least for 0.40, we keep it as meaning merely affecting canvas-selectability.

...

Most drawing applications combine both behaviors (unselectable and immutable) into their notion of "lock".

We'll keep that in mind, though Inkscape's general policy is that we should find the most useful behaviour, and let other programs catch

up.

This, quite honestly, is where the other guys (Adobe, Macromedia, etc) set the standard and people coming over will expect certain things to function in the same way. I'm not saying it's necessarily right, but layers are very important and people will get turned off if they're "broken" in their view.

If we separate unselectable and immutable into separate layer-level options it would make sense to all of us geeks. But most artists aren't really geeks and don't want separate functions, it just needs to do what they expect.

I guess the best way to explain it, is that a lock is for protection. The best analogy I have for the lock doing both functions is that if you have your front door locked on your house, people shouldn't be able to A) come in and B) rearrange your furniture. But you unlock it and it's all fair game. Basically the object is a house (properties being furniture), and we're the random people.

Just my .02 on the layer subject.

-Josh