Hi,
Snapping the object's rotation center is quite useful in some cases, but it can also be confusing in other cases. Imagine trying to align a square to a grid, with the square dimensions being an uneven multiple of the grid's pitch. While dragging the square around, it snaps it's edges to the grid as expected. But then suddenly it snaps while none of its edges appear to be aligned..... It's the center that is snapping, but there is no visual clue or anything pointing in that direction. Even after all the time I've spend plowing through the snapping code, it still fools me from time to time. In general, we should only snap points that have a visual clue, such as a corner of a bounding box, a tip of a star, or a node at a salient point of a path. Snapping nodes at a smooth path or object center's, which don't have a visual clue, can be confusing.
Maybe an additional checkbox in the snapping preferences dialog would be justified in this case: to enable/disable snapping the rotation center. By default it should be disabled. Too much checkboxes (like in v0.45.1) is confusing, but I think we need one for this. Does any one think otherwise or know of a better way?
In SVN the snapping dialog has changed for the better I hope, but feedback is always appreciated!
Diederik
On 7/22/07, Benjamin Esham <bdesham@...155...> wrote:
Just draw a star with star tool and position your path at the tips.
If you
need absolute precision, you can turn on snapping to object paths
and snap
them exactly to the star tips.
Thanks for the replies! My problem is that I need to align the *center* of each path to the points of the star. Since there is not necessarily a node at the exact center of each path, I don't think the snapping approach will work.
bulia byak wrote:
Actually, it should snap the object's rotation center (which you can place anywhere you want) as you drag the object. Diederik, what do you think? I was under the impression that it already does, but looks like it's not, so this needs to be enabled.