Ah, well I certainly didn't mean to complain, or insult developers. As I said a couple of times, I thought there was good chance I wasn't understanding that feature.
I was just looking for a way for objects which are arranged in a circle to be moved inwards towards the center, or outwards away, without scaling, and without using tiled clones. The Polor Coord. tab of Arrange dialog was suggested to me, so I was trying to make it work.
In this case, it's not a good solution, because those 6 objects "were born" where they are. I didn't draw one, duplicate, rotate and place them there. It was from a difference of a star shape minus pieces of another star shape. Something that I do quite often, and why I wish so much for an easier way to move pieces radially.
Anyway, thank you very much for taking the time to make the tutorial and explain the problem. :-)
All best, brynn
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From: Mark Crutch Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2016 10:21 AM To: Inkscape User Community Subject: Re: [Inkscape-user] problem with Arrange?
On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 5:05 PM, Brynn <brynn@...3089...> wrote:
Ok, here's where the problem was. In your step #3, in the SVG file, when you rotate -30 degrees, the arrow is pointing clockwise, which I thought was the positive direction.
Ah... I was basing "-30 degrees" on the text in the status bar, rather than anything to do with the orientation of the circle.
There are 4 "secrets" to make this work -- none of which I could have guessed.
1 - object #1 must be placed on point #1 in the circle 2 - the circle, despite being a shape and not a path, has directionality 3 - the circle has to be rotated backwards, and possibly flipped, depending on the desired selection order 4 - objects have to be selected in a certain order
In fairness to the Inkscape devs, a big part of the issue is that your objects were already rotated, and therefore had to be placed in specific locations in a specific order. Try it again with six copies of object 1 (i.e. the non-rotated one):
1) Ensure that "Rotate objects is enabled in the dialog. 2) Rubberband select all six objects, plus the circle. 3) Hit the Arrange button. 4) Rotate the whole result if you need it at a different angle.
A lot more straightforward!
I agree that it's not clear how the objects are placed, given that the direction and start point of the circle aren't obvious. Options to place them in reverse order, and to put the first on the start point of the circle, would make things a little clearer, but not by much.
I think what's really needed for this case (and many others) is another tab: "Align to nodes". This would align each object onto the nodes of a target path, with the first object on node 1, the second on node 2, and so on. That would have simplified this problem by letting you use a more obvious hexagon (from the Star tool) to set the target locations.
Mark
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