Hello inkscape developers,

many of my colleagues and myself are working in a scientific field which frequently requires the production of figures which are essentially bitmaps with some added annotations. A photograph with an arrow pointing at some feature. And a bar with two T-shaped ends to indicate a length unit.

The problem is that most of the images are pretty dark, so what would be required are white arrows and scales. Which is difficult, given how SVG treats markers totally seperately from the lines to which they're attached.

It is in fact this shortcoming in that has prevented me from advertising inkscape to my colleagues, many of which use WinDoze almost exclusively to prepare graphics in CorelDraw. For my own use I have created a markers.svg file in which I defined the most important arrows and stops in white, but this is a rather unstisfactory workaround (and it will be hell to explain to users why they should knuckle under restrictions which, from their point of view, have to do only with inkscape's weird data storage format -- all they need in the end is PostScript).

Let's face it: there is hardly any case in which one would want arrowheads and other markers to have a different color than the line to which they're attached. Sadly the creators of SVG haven't seen this and provided some marker style option that makes markers inherit the colors of their attached path. So what would be required is that inkscape silently added an additional marker definition for every line color that is used with a marker. Maybe the "Stroke Style" dialog could include a checkbox to turn off this behavior if desired.

I've looked into inkscape's code hoping to find a place where this functionality could be added but have found none. Anybody who is deeply familiar with inkscape's architecture could probably add the necessary code in one weekend, while it would take me weeks to just get my head around the entire source tree.

So I'd be glad if someone could look into this. Inkscape is a great piece of software, and this would make it even better.