Dear Inkscape User List,
A few months ago I wrote to the inkscape user list to ask about the possibility of adding some technical drawing features to your excellent application, and we had a great discussion about how useful snapping to nearest, endpoints, midpoints, intersections, quadrant, tangent, horizontal and vertical would be.
I recently noticed a similar posting [Maximilian Albert] on the 'devel' users list about adding similar features as part of a google soc 2008 project, and I wanted to say how useful I would find this, and hopefully a few people from before could write and add their support.
While I'm not a coder, I was hoping to add a couple of suggestions of my own as a user and avid fan:
- firstly, that the type of snap currently enforced (since several can be turned on at once) is displayed somehow near the cursor, and if several apply at once a key can be pressed to cycle between these
- secondly that snapping can be enabled whenever an input point is required, not just for new shapes. So the center of a translation could be from the midpoint of the side of a hexagon (say) and moved so it's aligned with the corner (endpoint) of a rectangle.
- thirdly that each type of snap could be quickly turned on and off with a simple keypress, and it's status displayed say in the status bar
The corel draw UI which implements this feature is explained in the file:
http://www.corel.com/uk/pdfs/cgs12/cdgs12_snapit.pdf
and autosketch (the first program I used with it) is explained at:
www.lepp.cornell.edu/~draft/ Manuals/AUTOSKETCH_USERS_GUIDE.pdf (p100)
If this feature is not considered large enough for soc, maybe it could be combined with some other technical drawing features like the three point circle, relative coordinates etc to make a larger one
Inkscape is a fantastic application, and with the newly added PDF editing (hence PS editing via ghostscript), technical drawing/snapping is the only barrier to extensive use at my university for publication of academic papers which would be really fantastic for many academics.
Thanks for listening!
Cheers, Alex