On Tue, 7 Dec 2004, Chris wrote:
On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 10:00 -0500, Robert Crosbie wrote:
The align dialog allows you to centre to page and others. Would that be what you're looking for? I believe when I last centred an equilateral triangle, it was to the triangle centre.
Nope. Even an equilateral triangle is not centered correctly (at least in my tests). Try it. Anything with an odd number of sides will not be able to be centered, or rotated for that matter, at its true center.
I mainly need this type of feature when working with geometric shapes or other symmetric type drawings. Think of trying to draw a 5-spoked car wheel or something similar. In many cases eyeballing it might be good enough, but for things like logos that's unacceptably inaccurate. This is especially annoying with complex shapes where you might get artifacts when shapes are not perfectly aligned.
A "snap to point" feature would be nice and helpful in this situation also. If you could select and node and snap that node to another node or grid point, moving the entire shape, that would be useful. So the node would snap to a specific location without changing the shape of the object.
Yup, good ideas; we've actually had a number of feature requests along these lines:
[ 863735 ] GUIDES: Snapping for 'shape editing nodes' [ 863737 ] Snap indicator+ snap/guides dialog/palette [ 928027 ] advanced snap features [ 907478 ] RFE: snap to nodes of existing objects [ 903432 ] Snap selection to grid command
I also wrote up a summary of all the snapping/aligning features back in the Sodipodi days: http://www.sodipodi.com/index.php3?section=development/tasks/alignment_snapp...
I think I also did a proposal for a 'snap to centroid' feature but didn't run across it with a quick search. Perhaps you could add a comment about that (or other additional ideas you have) to one of the above feature requests?
Snapping has been on the radar for a LONG time. I think we need someone to get real gung ho on investigating and attacking snapping features. Several people have been interested in working on it, and a few people have improved it a little, but we really need someone to focus on it for a large chunk of time and to make it work very powerfully. I don't think it's super hard, just would take some creativity and passion.
Bryce