It's essentially Patrick's suggestion from the bug report Brynn provided, but with the addition of a third "rule" that says what to do if an object is about to be drawn in a way that would render it invisible. The third rule could be added to the existing bug report, although that one is already a bit "wordy", so perhaps it might be worth opening a new issue with this entire proposal stated succinctly, then linking the original bug to the new one.

Mark

On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 12:20 PM, brynn <brynn@...3089...> wrote:

There's a bug report for avoiding new users making invisible objects because of the last used style. I shared it in my first message in this thread. This is that report:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1704777

However, I've gotten a bit lost in the technical discussions, so I'm not sure if the topic is still on this same solution as proposed in the above report. So fwiw :-)

brynn

-----Original Message----- From: Maren Hachmann
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2018 4:05 AM
To: inkscape-user@...2709...e.net
Subject: Re: [Inkscape-user] Inkscape can be extremely frustrating

This suggestion sounds reasonable to me.

Mark, do we already have a bug report for it, where this can be laid out
in detail?

Maren

Am 10.09.2018 um 11:56 schrieb Mark Crutch:

I often push the boundaries of Inkscape and SVG, in order to hide Easter
eggs in my comics, or when researching my Full Circle Magazine
tutorials. But even I can't think of a time when I've ever intentionally
*drawn* an invisible object.

There are plenty of times when I've drawn an object and then
intentionally made it invisible (e.g. for text on a path or, most
recently, when creating a SMIL animation path for my next tutorial), but
I always draw them as visible objects first.

There are too many ways that an object could be "invisible" to catch all
cases, but a simple rule of thumb might be that if both the fill and
stroke are set to "none", have an alpha value of zero, or the object's
opacity is zero, that the tool's default style is used. Combined with
the earlier proposal about reverting to the tool's own style on
start-up, this would lead to the following behaviour:

1) On starting Inkscape, creating a new image, or loading an existing
one, all tools are set to "tool's own style".
2) While working on a document, "last used style" is used (unless the
prefs are set to always use "tool's own style").
3) When a drawing tool is selected and the drawn object would be
invisible (based on the heuristics above, and perhaps some others), the
"last used style" is modified to match the "tool's own style".

It still wouldn't catch all cases - consider an alpha that's set close
to, but not quite zero - but I think an approach like this would help
new users whilst not particularly getting in the way of experienced users.

Mark

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