• Resizing objects resizes their line width. For the online comic, I'm

aiming to use a constant style, which includes a fixed line-width for all of the shapes. Adjusting line-widths on every resize is very frustrating - if this were modal (modified with a keypress, or via a setting), it would be a great improvement.

Done in CVS, although needs a bit more work

• Copy/paste between Inkscape instances seems broken. I had planned to

use one Inkscape document like a clipboard of comic bits (similar to Visio's stencils), but I couldn't get cut/paste to work.

Yes, we don't use system clipboard, although we really should. Needs work.

By the way, does anyone know of any library functions that would make this possible? I've searched through glib and gtk but found nothing.

• There is no 'application' toobar. I have a habit of clicking on save

from time to time (even though I also use ctrl-s). I haven't found a standard toolbar.

Planned. Actually it's an easy thing to do, but I heard about improvements in toolbar handling in gtk 2.6 and wanted to wait until we support it. But now that full customizability of window interface is in place (in CVS), I think I'll go on and assemble a "commands" toolbar for 0.39.

• Snap-to is a bit too snappy. Some applications have a snap-to that

allows both fine-positioning /and/ snap-to at the same time. One such application uses a modifier key while dragging objects (shift iirc), and another is just nice about its snappyness.

We now have in CVS a temporary no-snap mode when dragging with Alt. Needs to be made to use Shift and improved (should affect nodes in node tool as well). Carl, are you working on that?

• The text properties are not applied in real-time. Nearly every time I

modify the text properties of a chunk of text, I forget to click apply. Other similar applications apply these changes in real-time. I'm sure there's a performance (or other) reason why this isn't the case, but it results in many "D'Oh!"s.

That's going to be fixed when we have a top panel for text tool with most of the controls, all of which will be instant-apply. The dialog will be rarely needed then.

• A user-defined palette. The colour wheels and sliders are great for

picking colours, but I'm usually working with a very particular set of colours (and I'll work with those colours for many weeks). I've worked around this by drawing my own palette on the diagram, which I use instead.

Right now in CVS it's slightly improved in that you can use the dropper tool always, and apply its picked color to either fill or stroke (with shift). So you can have a "palette" in your document and easily pick all your colors from it without ever opening fill&stroke dialog. But of course we need a real palette. The good news is that I now have a complete plan of how to achieve that, and working on that (the dropper is the first step).

• Persisted document properties. For every document I create, I find I

have to make the same set of tweaks to the document settings. It would be really handy if this were persisted by Inkscape, and applied to each document created.

I.e. you want document templates for File->New. Also in our plans. It's a relatively easy project so if anyone feels like doing it, that would be great.

• A stencil-mechanism. I'd like to be able to save bits of drawings

that I could reuse later (cartoon bubbles/balloons, strip outlines, etc.)

I.e. defining symbols. It's not difficult from the SVG perspective, but the difficult part is that we need a new table-like widget for previewing and choosing the symbols. The same widget would be good to use for markers, instead of the bulky menus. Any ideas welcome. (For example, what does Nautilus use when it displays files as icons? Is this a standard widget?)

• A way to import bitmaps easily. One useful tool for an illustrator is

to be able to trace over a sketch loaded in the background (or in a box). I've never really liked auto-trace tools, so just the ability to load a bitmap into a box would be incredibly useful.

There are some improvements in this area in CVS (imported bitmaps are now rects that can be node-edited, etc.). I'm now working on that.

Summary: it's a bit early to boast about our usability I think. We made (barely) usable the stuff we have, but there are still too many functionality and usability gaps that are complained about again and again. We need more enthusiastic coders! :)

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