Donn wrote:
On Tuesday 05 December 2006 11:17, Thorsten Wilms wrote:
Paste Inside sounds like a very nice concept. Provided you can paste inside and In Place.
It was nice. Very nice. It had the superb quality of being entirely intuitive. You draw some larger shape. You select a bunch of any other stuff. You select the big shape and Paste Inside. Bang! Your stuff now lives inside the big shape - as if in a new world - like a new canvas almost! You could select the stuff inside, move-it, node-edit it, fill it, etc. Anytime you wanted stuff out, you sub-select it and Cut it. Bang!
For the record, I wanted our clip/mask to function like it did in Illustrator... until Bulia explained why our way is better.
Why is it better? It's much more flexible and intuitive once you have a better understanding of Inkscape as a whole. The good news? You can achieve what you want quite easily in Inkscape.
First, group those objects that you want on the "inside", then clip that group (as opposed to clipping a bunch of separate objects). Once clipped, if you double click on that group you will "enter" it. This means that you can move the shapes around within the "new world" as you put it. :) When you're done editing inside the group you can double click on empty canvas or simply select an object not within that group to leave it.
A recap... Group objects, clip group, and "enter" the group (double click) to move objects around inside the clipped area. Then you can leave the group when you're done.
The best part is that it's consistent with how we handle all groups. A key thing to look for when you traverse into a group is in the status bar. If you look at the layer selector (in the status bar), you will see that it changed to the group's name/number as opposed to the parent layer's name. This is very useful if you especially if you have nested groups.
I hope that was helpful more than it was confusing. :)
-Josh