Dear Inkscape User List,

A few months ago I wrote to the inkscape user list to ask about the possibility of adding some technical drawing features to your excellent application, and we had a great discussion about how useful snapping to nearest, endpoints, midpoints, intersections, quadrant, tangent, horizontal and vertical would be.

I recently noticed a similar posting [Maximilian Albert] on the 'devel' users list about adding similar features as part of a google soc 2008 project, and I wanted to say how useful I would find this, and hopefully a few people from before could write and add their support.

While I'm not a coder, I was hoping to add a couple of suggestions of my own as a user and avid fan:

- firstly, that the type of snap currently enforced (since several can be turned on at once) is displayed somehow near the cursor, and if several apply at once a key can be pressed to cycle between these

- secondly that snapping can be enabled whenever an input point is required, not just for new shapes. So the center of a translation could be from the midpoint of the side of a hexagon (say) and moved so it's aligned with the corner (endpoint) of a rectangle.

- thirdly that each type of snap could be quickly turned on and off with a simple keypress, and it's status displayed say in the status bar

The corel draw UI which implements this feature is explained in the file:

http://www.corel.com/uk/pdfs/cgs12/cdgs12_snapit.pdf

and autosketch (the first program I used with it) is explained at:

www.lepp.cornell.edu/~draft/ Manuals/AUTOSKETCH_USERS_GUIDE.pdf (p100)

If this feature is not considered large enough for soc, maybe it could be combined with some other technical drawing features like the three point circle, relative coordinates etc to make a larger one

Inkscape is a fantastic application, and with the newly added PDF editing (hence PS editing via ghostscript), technical drawing/snapping is the only barrier to extensive use at my university for publication of academic papers which would be really fantastic for many academics.

Thanks for listening!

Cheers, Alex

A.J. Carter wrote:

• firstly, that the type of snap currently enforced (since several can be

turned on at once) is displayed somehow near the cursor, and if several apply at once a key can be pressed to cycle between these [...]

• thirdly that each type of snap could be quickly turned on and off with a

simple keypress, and it's status displayed say in the status bar

Indeed, it should be indicated somewhere which snap mode is active. I'd prefer to go the status bar route though, because I don't think it's important enough to display it near the cursor. Besides, showing it at the status bar is the easiest thing to implement. Please file an RFE for this in Launchpad and assign it to me.

About the cycling / toggling of the snap mode: if you toggle the visibility of the grid/guides, you also toggle the snapping. This toggling is already linked to keys (# and | ), isn't this sufficiently convenient? Of course there will be use cases for snapping to invisible grids (or not snapping to visible grids), but these are probably much less common. For these special cases one would simply have to open the document properties dialog, that's only little additional effort. I can think of stuff that needs to be fixed or implemented more urgently on which I'd rather spend my precious time ;-).

• secondly that snapping can be enabled whenever an input point is

required, not just for new shapes. So the center of a translation could be from the midpoint of the side of a hexagon (say) and moved so it's aligned with the corner (endpoint) of a rectangle.

I'm not sure that I fully understand what you're trying to explain here: what do you mean with "center of a translation"? Would you simply like to have the midpoint of one of the hexagon's sides aligned to a corner of the rectangle? That will be possible as soon as I implement the snapping of midpoints, which is on my todo list. Currently, we could only snap the hexagon's nodes (endpoints) to that corner.

Regards,

Diederik

-----Original Message----- From: inkscape-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:inkscape-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Diederik van Lierop Sent: maandag 31 maart 2008 22:44

Indeed, it should be indicated somewhere which snap mode is active. I'd prefer to go the status bar route though, because I don't think it's important enough to display it near the cursor.

But it would be nice to temporary show next to the cursor what type of snap happened! ;)

Johan

Dear Diederik,

Thanks so much for taking the time to reply (see below).

Indeed, it should be indicated somewhere which snap mode is active. I'd prefer to go the status bar route though, because I don't think it's important enough to display it near the cursor. Besides, showing it at the status bar is the easiest thing to implement. Please file an RFE for this in Launchpad and assign it to me.

I was thinking of the status bar giving a quick indication of which snap modes (insersection, quadrant) are currently globally turned on, since several could be on at once. A single keypress could then visually turn each off at once without loading the document properties tab.

To indicate the current snap as a line is drawn I was thinking of something either floating next to the cursor, or the shape of the cursor changing as it jumps when you are drawing a line and come within a 'snap radius' of an active snapping point (as Johan said).

I think it would be important to indicate to the user in some way whether the system thinks it's currently snapping to a gridpoint or an endpoint if two are nearby and both types of snap are turned on at once.

I've found the following page online with a few screenshots showing corel draw - if you scroll to the bottom of the page and see the image before last. As you see corel shows the type of snap as a line is drawn by the shape of the cursor, and by the floating 'help' message.

http://www.cadintools.com/cdr_tips.htm

I'm not sure that I fully understand what you're trying to explain here: what do you mean with "center of a translation"?

To explain what I was meaning, if you take a look at the final screenshot on the same page:

http://www.cadintools.com/cdr_tips.htm

In this they want to move (translate) the rectange from the upper left position so that it ends up just touching the circle. With the snap enabled as they click to select the rectangle they can pick it up _from_ the midpoint of the right side (so that is where they are 'holding it' as they move) and then release when this point is caught by the quadrant snap of the circle. This guarantees the rectange and circle are perfectly aligned and touching, and applies to all types of snap. When I said 'centre of translation' I was meaning the midpoint of the right side of this rectange in this case, and this centre can be selecting using all possible snap points of an object or group of objects.

I hope that makes what I was meaning clearer ?

I agree with Shawn that with multiple grids possible the on/off snap is a property of each which I hadn't though of before!

Thanks for your time Diederik and for the patience to listen again - I;d lvoe to hear any comments :-)

Alex

Hi,

First off, are you using just the live path effects or the actual Geometry Tool (as I believe it will be called)? My guess is you're not using the tool as the button for it is not enabled in the nightly builds, in Inkscape hit Ctrl+Shift+F6 to switch to it. The tool is not close to completion from my understanding and a number of changes are still on Max's todo list. Another thing is that we received word from Max about 2 weeks ago that his laptop was no longer working, so more work on it from him is on hold at the moment. I know this wasn't the type of response you were looking for, but I didn't want you to feel that your message was being ignored (since it would be Max who would reply and he's unable to).

Cheers, Josh

A.J. Carter wrote:

Hi,

I'm a physicist who is a regular user of inkscape. I've written to the mailing list before to ask about the possibility of increasing the number of tools for technical drawing (snapping, geometric constructions etc.). I was very excited to hear that Maximillian Albert was implementing some of these as part of GSOC 2008, and I've just been trying the latest development snapshot.

As a autodesk/corel user I was expecting tools for things like the 3 point circle, 2 point circle to appear as flyouts for the circle tool (or a seperate icon somewhere), and the tangent/bisector to be a kind of 'snapping constraint' when drawing new shapes that was either on or off.

I'm having trouble understanding how to use these features as inkscape live path effects, and I wondered if anyone could explain how to make them work?

Also, what is the benefit of implementing these as LPE's as opposed to the more usual CAD approach adopted by corel designer 12/X4 or autocad etc?

Many thanks,

Alex

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Can I second that WOW ! I hadn't found that toolbar so thankyou to Josh for pointing it out to me; it all makes much more sense now.

A lot of physicists like myself and light technical drawing enthusiasts will be very excited by the next release :-)

Alex

On Thu, 9 Oct 2008, heathenx wrote:

Been quietly listening in. Ctrl+Shift+F6 = WOW! That new mirror tool is something else. Very excited about these new features. CAD people will appreciate this. :)

heathenx

Josh Andler wrote the following on 10/9/2008 1:20 PM:

...

Hi,

First off, are you using just the live path effects or the actual Geometry Tool (as I believe it will be called)? My guess is you're not using the tool as the button for it is not enabled in the nightly builds, in Inkscape hit Ctrl+Shift+F6 to switch to it. The tool is not close to completion from my understanding and a number of changes are still on Max's todo list. Another thing is that we received word from Max about 2 weeks ago that his laptop was no longer working, so more work on it from him is on hold at the moment. I know this wasn't the type of response you were looking for, but I didn't want you to feel that your message was being ignored (since it would be Max who would reply and he's unable to).

Cheers, Josh

A.J. Carter wrote:

...

Hi,

I'm a physicist who is a regular user of inkscape. I've written to the mailing list before to ask about the possibility of increasing the number of tools for technical drawing (snapping, geometric constructions etc.). I was very excited to hear that Maximillian Albert was implementing some of these as part of GSOC 2008, and I've just been trying the latest development snapshot.

As a autodesk/corel user I was expecting tools for things like the 3 point circle, 2 point circle to appear as flyouts for the circle tool (or a seperate icon somewhere), and the tangent/bisector to be a kind of 'snapping constraint' when drawing new shapes that was either on or off.

I'm having trouble understanding how to use these features as inkscape live path effects, and I wondered if anyone could explain how to make them work?

Also, what is the benefit of implementing these as LPE's as opposed to the more usual CAD approach adopted by corel designer 12/X4 or autocad etc?

Many thanks,

Alex

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Hello,

This is possibly a little off topic, but I just came across this web-page with some examples of technical drawings. Admittedly they are drawn in illustrator but the ship in particular is so breathtakingly complicated (640MB, 720 hours) that I thought other people may appreciate it!

http://www.khulsey.com/demo_1howto.html

Make sure to click the 'see the latest high resolution' link to appreciate the depth of the detail.

Hello,

As a regular inkscape user within a university I was excited last year about the possibility of some technical drawing features as part of GSOC 2008 (Maxamillian Albert).

I was wonderinf if anyone might know whether anything ever came of it ?

Thanks,

Alex