On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 05:46:43PM +0000, Brian Cochran wrote:
I'm using inkscape for crime scene drawing. It works great and is very easy to teach. I have tried to do to scale drawings and been unable to do so. What I'm looking for is 1 inch = 60 inch type feature. I'm fairly certain there is no easy way to do that now. I was wondering if this was a feature that might in enough demand that it maybe included in future releases? If not any ideas on a work around would be great.
I agree this is definitely a greatly needed feature. In fact I think someone else was asking for this same feature just the other day.
I've been doing woodworking drawings with Inkscape, and have tried out a few workarounds.
First, I make heavy, heavy use of the grid. I draw a rectangle that roughly approximates the maximum perimeter of the object or area I'm drawing, and size it to about the size I'd like it to be on the final printed page (i.e., if it's a room, I make it fill the page, but if I'm doing a piece of furniture I make it a quarter of the page, so I have room for front and size views, etc.) Now I open the Document Properties dialog and adjust the Spacing X and Spacing Y settings until I get a gride size where each grid unit equates to 1 inch or 1 foot. I find that a grid unit on the order of 1/100th of my principle dimension seems to work for me (remember you can always change grid settings later if you need more precision).
Next, make smart use of the Major Grid Line setting, as the base grid scale will be too small for visibility much of the time. I often set it to some multiple like 4, 5, 10, 12, or 20.
For snapping, I turn off 'Snap bounding boxes', and turn on 'Snap nodes to grid'. I also turn the snap sensitivity up fairly high, as I don't draw off-grid while the grid is turned on.
Then, the really embarrassing part - I make myself a spacer. I draw a rectangle of some convenient dimension, like 20 inches, and then use it as a quick way to measure out my dimensions. If I need to make the side of a room 146.5 inches, then I'll create 7 copies of the spacer end to end, and then zoom in at the end and manually count the last 6 or 7 inches (I don't care about sub-inch precision in the drawing).
This sounds like a lot of work (and it is), but once I've gone through it once, when I have a new drawing I can simply load up an existing drawing of similar scale and re-use it. Even better would be to make it a template by putting it into my ~/.inkscape/templates/ directory, but I haven't experimented with that much so far.
Bryce