On Nov 12, 2007 4:27 PM, Rob Antonishen <rob.antonishen@...155...> wrote:
Is there a way in Inkscape (extension/plugin) to automatically set the z-order of a number of objects?
Not yet, but I'm sure what you propose would be a very useful extension.
Ideally, I could provide a direction/line and have it change the z-order of all the selected objects in that orientation (though I would settle for top->down and left->right as I could just pre- and post- rotate)
Yes, I think choosing horizontal and vertical directions for z-oder increase should be sufficient. Also you need to provide a switch for what to consider for determining the directions, e.g. centers or left/right edges (for horizontal).
I have written script-fu extension for GIMP before, but think that Inkscape is much harder to add to that way...
I dunno about Gimp, but Inkscape extensions are pretty easy. This one however is a bit cumbersome because Inkscape does not pass to the extensions the bboxes of the selected objects. (I proposed to add this to the extensions API; Ted, is there any reason why you don't want to do this?) There's a workaround possible where you call another copy of Inkscape from the extension using the query command line params and parse what is returned - it's quite awkward but it works.