Hi,

From: Jon Phillips <jon@...235...>

I also notice that Alt+middle drag is currently free. So I think it would make sense to enable it to rotate the canvas as well, push-style, in addition to Alt+mousewheel that would rotate it by increments (especially since in at least some devices, the mousewheel is the same as middle button). Alt+double middle click could then reset it back to zero angle.

I have alt-(various mouse buttons) currently set to do window and workspace management things. Makes node sculpting a little troublesome sometimes (but if I click first, then press alt, seems to work ok).

To not use alt for such things, from the beginning I've programmed my Laidout program to have: plain-right-click be context sensitive help, shift-right-drag shifts (pans) the canvas around control-right-drag scales the canvas (centered on mouse) shift-control-right-drag rotates the canvas (centered on mouse)

Right now in Inkscape, control-R-drag seems to pan, (shift or control)-R click without dragging zooms in and out. What if it was more like the above?

From: Jon Phillips <jon@...235...>

Yep, that is the fun of Inkscape-style development :) Welcome aboard and good luck! Personally, what I would like as well is custom document sizes, possibly from the outlines of SVG ie, weird shapes that can be folded into packaging, t-shirt designs, etc...cheers!

Another thing I'm designing into Laidout! Though right now, it can only do polygonal non-rectangular pages. Someday it'll be any bezier path, so I can do layout on, for instance, the shape formed by the intersection of several cylinders, which makes faces whose sides are sine waves. Of course, objects going over page boundaries is rather a chore to make work in an expected way, but it's worth it in the end.

From: "Alexandre Prokoudine" <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...>

If you get far enough, there is another long time awaited feature that would make a perfect sense when canvas rotation is implemented: arbitrary guides ;-)

Another future Laidout feature! If by arbitrary guides you mean arbitrary bezier paths, especially for text. Whenever I make up a new resume, I find myself wanting to make tabstops lie along some funky curve, rather than a boring old straight vertical line.

Another guide idea I'm working on is "2-d guides" for help in importing multiple images, a kind of a distribution tool, to distribute into 1 or more specified regions with specified orientations, whether to rescale objects to fit, and whether to dump objects into a space as a kind of stream. One application of this is dumping in 4 photos into 4 sections on a page, so that each image is the maximum size it can be within each section, rotating the photo if need be.

All of these things would be awesome in Inkscape!

Tom http://www.tomlechner.com http://www.laidout.org