Hi Martin,

I appreciate your efforts to improve the Symbol dialog and I apologize for not responding to your review of the Symbol dialog... I have been quite busy with family obligations.

On Mon, 2013-04-22 at 19:34 -0400, Martin Owens wrote:

Hey devs,

I'm going to be making two changes to the UI for symbols.

1. Firstly, we move the Symbol to Group and Group to Symbol out of the

Object menu where it's out-of-context and into the symbols UI itself. This means the 'Current Document' symbols will be visible when you add and remove symbols. (I'll also be fixing it so the Symbol to Group works on the symbol selection and not just a use element)

Adding the +/- is probably good. The "-" should only be active if a symbol has been selected, and the "+" only if an object on the screen is selected. It probably should be done with verbs, as Jon wrote.

2. The second piece is to move the two preferences out of the symbols UI

and into the Inkscape preferences. Edit > Preferences > Interface > Symbols. I'm interested in ideas where best to place these in the existing tree.

NO! These are things that I change often. The first preference (Preview Scale) is absolutely needed. The first two files with symbols I looked at had symbol sizes of 3 px and 30,000 px. Thus one needs the "Scale to Fit" selection. At the same time, one would like to be able to view all the symbols at the same scale (if possible). The better way to handle this (if you are worried about screen real estate) is, as suggested in the original discussion, to add a section to the dialog that can be opened or closed. This section then could also include a third option to set a scale for pasting the symbol.

Tav