On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 03:02:29PM +0000, Bryce Harrington

wrote:

...

• You could define an origin/anchor point for a group,

so

...

only that point will snap to the grid....this would mean your circuit symbols and blocks would always line up

with

...

their connecting lines.

This can't be done presently, but it would be *very*

handy. I recall

writing a feature request for something like this long

ago, so it's

already in the tracker. We just need someone to work on

it.

...

• You could set different grid settings for groups, so

that

...

you can do fine detail editing to your symbols, without having to reduce/increase the grid settings every time.

(Also some shortcuts to automatically reduce/increase

the

...

grid spacing x5 or x10 would probably be useful, and

maybe

...

they should also zoom too...........are shortcuts configurable enough already to be able to do this?)

These are interesting ideas, and I don't recall seeing

them proposed

before. You could check in the Request For Enhancement

(RFE) tracker

through the website, and see if this has already been

proposed; if so,

add your thoughts to it, or if not, add a new request for

it.

Thanks for filling me in on all this. When I get a chance, I'll have a look through the RFE tracker and add/amend entries on these.

...

One other cosmetic thing I noticed was that all the

dialogs

...

were different sizes (on my Windows Inkscape 0.43 at

least).

...

It would be nice if they had the same widths or heights

so

...

they could be lined up tidly around the sides of the

main

...

Inkscape window.

I think the idea has been to keep them to the absolute

minimum size so

they don't use up more screen realestate than necessary.

However the

dialogs are coded to remember their height/width settings

from session

to session, so I think you should be able to resize them

to your

preference and they should stick that way. It's possible this doesn't work on Windows, though (I haven't tested it

there), but

that'd be considered a bug. ;-)

Yeah, it looks like it could be Windows-specific alright...I'll have to check out the Linux version to see. The problem I was having was more that the minimum size of the dialogs was very big (e.g. the document prefs dialog had a minimum width of about 1/5 the screen - this is at 1600x1200 with Windows XP "normal" font sizes). A lot of the text input fields seemed much wider than necessary, so it might be something to do with calculating the width of these text fields.

Thinking about lining up the dialogs again, my motivation for this was that since all windows are rectangular, and you're most likely going to have a drawing window and more than one dialog on the screen at any one time, there's going to be "dead" space unless the dialogs share the same width or height.

The picture I have is of several dialogs of the same width down one side of the screen, and optionally dialogs of the same height across the top/bottom, with the drawing window using the remainder of the screen.

(Of course this wouldn't be the best for people with small screens)

A nice way to offer this to the user might be to have a "Tile Dialogs" option, like the "Tile Windows" you often see in multi-document GUI apps. I'll put in an RFE for something like this too if there's nothing similar already.

Some other random observations...which I'll also keep an eye out for in the RFE tracker...

* Marker color really should change with that of the path to which it is attached

* More control over marker size would be great

* Is it right to always center the markers on the end nodes of the line? It is for circular markers, but not for arrows (think of a flow diagram with arrows connecting boxes), and sometimes not for other shapes.

* The drop-down list for selecting markers is pretty cumbersome, this would be much better as a 2d grid (with the marker names left out, or else popping up as tooltips). Even better might be to have a separate dialog like the swatches dialog for markers.

* If you are editing a document created elsewhere with fonts that are unavailable (e.g. editing on Windows, document created on Linux with Ghostscript fonts), the text tool will not pick up the font size, so making any edit to the text will change the font size to whatever is currently set in the text tool.

* When editing baseline-adjusted text, the baseline-adjust is not maintained logically, e.g. if the text was "Vout" where "out" is baseline-adjusted, it is not possible to replace the "o" with another character without the baseline being reset for the new character.

* Probably too specialised to be used very often, but a CAD-style snap-to- tangent / end-point / mid-point / center / etc. would be nice.

* It should be possible to edit the stroke settings for a group (at least if the settings for all objects in the group are the same)

Regards, Ken