SpecGuidesImprovement

Launchpad Entry: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/guides-improvement

Summary

This specs provides a comprehensive way of managing guides and guidesets (which are groups of guides).

Rationale

Guides are one of the stronger workhorses of any vector editing application. Inkscape has a powerful set of options but I feel the way to manage guides is mainly focused on a per-guide basis and has lagged a bit behind the overall quality of the software. My points for this argument are:

• The current dialog for manually setting guides properties is not as good as it should be since it tops the main window and the user has to pop-up the guides dialog for every editing, breaking the workflow. Also, is inconsistent with the way dock tabs work (much less obstructive).
• The user can't change the color as a per-guide basis.
• This spec adds basic managing operations such as add, remove, copy, visible/invisible and lock/unlock for guides.
  • Lock /unlock lets the user specify if the guides should be selectable along the objects or not.
• It also deploys a complete UI framework for fitting the current types of guides (horizontal, vertical and angled) and adding other types of guides (see composition guides, or others to come).
• This spec introduces the concept of a Guideset (or just Set). This is a bunch of guides that are grouped, having common managing options (copy, delete, visible/invisible, move and rotate). If the user selects a set, all of the guides inside it get edited homogeneously.
• Right now, the user can edit the angle of the guide numerically but not on-canvas. I try to improve this too.

Design

TODO

* Talk about attaching a guide to an object (good, bad idea).
* Detail how to use it: Sets like "text" and inside them guides like "text", "title1", "footnote", etc.

Discussion

• IDEA: Add snap option for every guide or every set, so the user is able to decide if snappable elements should snap to it or not.