Quoting "Andrew S. Townley" <atownley@...504...>:
I'm guessing the key is in the transformation dialog, but I'm not sure what to do.
SVG is limited to affine transformations (scale, rotate, transform, skew [aka shear]).
From a technical perspective, we can still "fake" perspective
transformations for some types of objects, but it's not possible to do for all types of objects. Either way, nobody's implemented it in Inkscape yet.
I've done this before in the Gimp, but it was a rough-guess approach
The Gimp (as of 2.2, at least -- maybe you need a newer version) has a dedicated "perspective" tool, appearing between the shear and flip tools. Its default keyboard shortcut is Shift+P.
If you have created a flat arrangement of shapes, I want to proportionally shrink (say the left) one side so that it looks in perspective. Then I can provide a "stacked-but-expanded" view of a system.
For a diagram, "isometric" (no vanishing point) perspective might be sufficient. You can simulate that easily with a horizontal skew.
[you'll need a non-proportional font for the below diagram to make sense]
shape:
+------------+ | | | | | | | | | | +------------+
scale | V
+------------+ | | | | +------------+
skew ->
+------------+ / / / / +------------+
stack:
+------------+ / / / /-+ +------------+ / / /-+ +------------+ / / /-+ +------------+ / / / +------------+
-mental