Hello all,
* Angled Guidelines
Now, Inkscape also provides angled guidelines! Double click on a guide to set its angle.
Regards, Johan
J.B.C.Engelen@...1578... schrieb:
Great work! This was an often requested feature, and I'm sure it will be extremely useful for a lot of users.
One suggestion: Would it be hard to add live preview and/or an option to pin the dialog (analogously to how the effects dialogs work)? Or maybe it would be enough to interactively adjust the angle/position when Enter is pressed in one of the entry fields. BTW, now that I tried it again, Enter does already work in the first entry field (for the horizontal coordinate) but not in the other ones. However, it closes the dialog. Would it be possible/desirable to make it adjust the guideline but not close the dialog so that further adjustments can be made?
And here is a minor bug: In the first line of the dialog (which contains the description, saying "Moving ... degree guideline at ..."), the sign of the angle is wrong (i.e., when it's a 30 degree guideline it says -30 degrees).
As for general usability, I find it a bit inconvenient to have to think of a guideline as attached at a certain point on the canvas. Of course, this is the way it is represented mathematically, but for me it's simply a line with no beginning or end. In particular, none of its points is distinguished from the others in any visible way. So I wonder if this can be reflected in the dialog, i.e., get rid of the "anchor point" of the guideline (or at least to provide an option to neglect it). Haven't been able so far to come up with a good idea, though.
Or will this become a non-issue once there is increased mouse support for angled guidelines? Are there any plans for this yet? Here are two possibilities that came to my mind:
1) Make guidelines rotateable (e.g., when a modifier key is pressed). Don't know around which point it should rotate, but maybe one of the intersections with the border of the visible area, or the midpoint between these intersections, would be convenient.
2) When double-clicking (or Shift-clicking or shift-double-clicking or whatever) a guideline, show its anchor point (much like clicking twice in the selector tool shows the rotation center), which can then be dragged to any position. Also, dragging a guideline with the anchor being visible should result in a rotation about this point rather than a parallel movement.
This is just offhand, though, and I don't know how it's handled in other programs. Maybe there are much better approaches.
Anyway, many thanks again to Johan and Merry Christmas to all. :)
Max
Maximilian Albert wrote:
or
3) Divide the guidelines in three parts; when grabbing the middle part the guideline can be translated, whereas it can be rotated by grabbing the upper or lower part. The pivot point is in the middle. Or when available, use a point to which the guide has snapped for pivoting and allow the rotating line to snap to an additional node, so we can have the angle determined by two nodes. Then the user will never have to calculate or estimate an angle!
BTW, when dragging a guideline it snaps to object nodes. This does not yet work for angled guidelines however, only for the old vertical/horizontal guidelines. Snapping objects _to_ an angled guideline should work though, but I haven't tested Johan's latest commit yet.
Excellent work indeed Johan!
Diederik
The guideline dialog is a big mess imho. But it would take to much to fix it now, probably become buggy aswell, so let's leave it for 0.46.
Thanks, it is fixed now.
You need to set that anchor point, otherwise you cannot rotate the line! Think of it as a point through which the guideline certainly passes.
first of all: think 0.47 :P
Anyway, many thanks again to Johan and Merry Christmas to all. :)
Merry X-mas to you too!
-johan
J.B.C.Engelen@...1578... schrieb:
The guideline dialog is a big mess imho. But it would take to much to fix it now, probably become buggy aswell, so let's leave it for 0.46.
Sure. Also, it's not that you alone should be burdened with this work. Just figured that you were a bit more familiar with it than most of us and could make valuable comments.
Yeah, I know that it's of course required under the hood. But normally I don't know or don't care around which point the guideline should rotate when setting the angle manually in the dialog. So from a user's perspective I find it slightly clumsy. But I guess better canvas interactivity will eliminate the need for using the dialog most of the time anyway.
Having given it a second though, I believe it would be nice to add a kind of "rotation center" to guidelines as well, which would only be visible when a guideline is clicked twice (similar to how it works with objects in the Selector tool). Then this rotation center could be dragged freely around the canvas (which would also move the guideline so that both are always bound to each other), and the coordinates of the rotation center would be the ones displayed in the guidelines dialog. This way these coordinates are given a concrete visual interpretation, and it is always immediately clear around which point the guideline will rotate when it is dragged. Does this make sense, or are there better suggestions? In any case, as Johan succinctly pointed out:
first of all: think 0.47 :P
Regards, Max
P.S.: I'd personally vote to give the following bug fix 12 credit points, too, even if it's not rated critical. :)
-----Original Message-----
You can choose to just ignore the x,y values :P I agree that the dialog is not up to Inkscape's standard, and should be redone in 0.47.
I think this is how coreldraw does it. At the moment, guidelines are not selectable so it seems that this would imply a lot of under-the-hood coding. It is how I would like it though, yes. :-)
Johan,
Excellent work!
I think the dialog *should* have the coordinates of the anchor point (makes precision placement possible, of course, which many people will want).
To make the dialog about 1000% more intuitive :) you could just change some text and rearrange stuff, at least for this release.
------------------------------------------ Guideline: (guide name) Current anchor: (x,y - a degrees)
Move anchor to: x position: [x] y position: [y] unit: [unit selector /]
Set angle to: angle: [a degrees]
Relative move [] ------------------------------------------
This (or something similar) would make everything a lot clearer, if there's time for it.
Again, excellent work!
JF
J.B.C.Engelen@...1578... schrieb:
Another issue, combined with a question: What happend to the "Always snap" option in Document Properties (both for snapping to grids and guides)? Do I understand it correctly that when "Snap at a specified distance" is unchecked then it snaps unconditionally? At first glance I would expect it to not snap at all; I find this extremely confusing.
It also almost made me report a "non-bug". Namely, say that there are two guidelines present. When the above-mentioned option is disabled and you draw a rectangle then it snaps unconditionally to the intersection of the guidelines. Since there is no other point to snap to, you always get a rectangle of zero width and zero height (it takes a while to find out that a rectangle was created at all). This can only be circumvented by disabling snapping globally, which also disables all other snapping modes and can't be desired.
So I very much vote for giving the "Always snap" options back. At least there must be a way for the user to notice that snapping to grids/guides is supposed to happen even if no checkbox is marked in Document Properties.
Thanks, Max
Maximilian Albert wrote:
It has only been renamed; see Ted's suggestion in his mail of December 13th. If you look at it the other way though, then "always snap" was also confusing because it didn't _always_ snap. For example, it would still depend on whether snapping was enabled globally, and whether snapping was enabled for that specific grid. Could it be that it just depends on what you're most used too?
It shouldn't be too difficult to keep Inkscape from snapping to the starting point of the rectangle while creating it. I'll add that to the code, as this would be IMHO the best way to handle this. The behavior you're describing though is exactly as it's intended to be, so we should keep that. I think however that always snapping regardless of the distance is only useful for grids. Maybe we should get rid of this option for the guideline and object snapper?
Whether the "snap at specified distance" is checked or not, is not relevant for snapping to occur. It only controls the snapping range. Besides, the default values make sense as it currently will only snap to grids regardless of distance.
Diederik
When dragging a guideline off the rulers close to the edge, the guideline will automatically be angled. The angle is set depending on the enabled grid.
* For the rectangular grid, the angle is 45 degrees. * For the axonometric grid, the angle is matched to the grid. When the Ctrl-key is pressed, the angle is perpendicular to the grid lines (useful for aligning gradients).
Cheers, Johan
On Dec 23, 2007 7:49 PM, wrote:
As for changing angle, another way would be adding a small handle to each guide, dragging which to the right/left would "rotate" that guide, with some modifier like Ctrl - to "rotate" with a default step (15 degrees, right?). What do you think?
Alexandre
participants (5)
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unknown＠example.com -
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Diederik van Lierop -
Joshua Facemyer / Impressus Art -
Maximilian Albert