Maarten van der Velde wrote:
Curious if I get some reactions THIS time... I'm playing around with Adobe Flex at the moment and one feature stroke me as being realy usefull: containers. These containers are basically boxes, but they apply lay-out rules to the objects they contain. There is for example a Vbox and a Hbox, that align and distribute the objects they contain automatically in respectivaly vertical and a horizontal manner. There's also a grid container that tries to put its "children" in a grid of equal dimensions. Inkscape has already the posibility to allign, distribute and grid-allign objects, but if it could be done _automatically_ ? I have no idea about the SVG-specification, but a crude way of doing it could be creating a script that iterates through all the groups in the document that have a certain attribute connected to them and applying the aformentioned lay-out rules on the objects they contain - effectively resetting the x and y values of them. If this script is just an "effect" instead of an "auto-update" - so be it.
This lay-out-container feature would be very practical in creating scheme's and such and GUI-mock ups.
Certainly an interesting idea. Sounds like you are asking for something like a live mode for the allignment and distribution methods that we already provide. This and a number of other features would be useful for constrained diagramming. Have you seen dunnart? http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~mwybrow/dunnart/
Aaron Spike