On 2007-February-14 , at 18:46 , Brian Cochran wrote:
I'm using inkscape for crime scene drawing.
wow, that's not a common use case I guess! cooool.
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.
If I understand you well, you want to draw things on an inkscape document which has printable dimensions (such as A3 paper for example) but still enter dimensions and see all you coordinates in real world measures (meters or inches). I don't think this is possible with inkscape currently (though it might just be a mater of writing a global scale factor in the XML document editor. knowledgeable people please step in). meanwhile, a solution would be to draw things on a sheet directly with real world measures, as if you were drawing on the ground of your crime scene! That's the beauty of scalability: Inkscape can handles drawings on a 10mx10m sheet as well as drawings on a A4 sheet. You can set up default units to be inches or meters, as well as set up corresponding units for the grid in the document properties dialog. Then when you draw a table of 60 inches width you actually draw a rectangle 60 inches wide in inkscape. The only issue is that you look at it from veeery far so you need to increase the stroke width from the usual 1pixel to something like 1cm. However this introduces some inexactitudes in the object dimensions (because the dimensions take the stroke into account... grrrr I don't know if this is mandatory in SVG specs but this is a real problem for precision drawings). If this is a problem for you indeed, you can keep your strokes 1px wide and switch to outline mode where they become visible (View > Mode > Outline). Then, when you are finished positioning objects in real world measures you can scale everything down to a printable size (beware to click the "scale stroke" button on the top toolbar if you changed your strokes to 1cm because otherwise all your object will keep their 1cm stroke when printed).
Hope that helps.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/