I'm trying to use Inkscape for sketching technical concepts like this:


For positioning elements it would be easier to have the ruler zeros in the center of the page, is that possible?
Is it possible to position a circle using the center coordinates?
There's a lot of symmetrical stuff here and I wonder if there's an easy way to reuse elements using the mirror function.

thanks

JimR

Although it's been requested before it's not possible to change the coordinate system, maybe in one of the future versions.

But you can achieve what you want very easily using the Align dialogue, Grids or Guides, and even easier with the new snapping options that are available in the development builds.

With the Align dialogue you can center objects to page, or to one another. You can use grids with the geometric option for objects bounding box so you can set the dimensions without rounding errors and snap them to grid.

The easiest way is to use development build with snapping toolbar. There are options to snap to object centers and rotation centers, midpoints of bounding boxes which seem to be what you need, and lots of other useful features... You can install the dev build independently of the official 0.46 version so you have both at the same time, it's worth a try.

There was a Mirror Live path effect but I think it's not available atm, but you probably only need Clones. Create one object (or group of objects), make a clone and move it to it's position, flip it if necessary. This way when you edit the original clones will update automatically.

Thanks, I am already using the grid and guides.

I started with the circle and aligned the other objects to it, my biggest problem was aligning the circle to the crossing of the two guide lines in the beginning.

I think I already have a snap-to-object-center option in 0.46?

I have enough to do learning 0.46 properly so Im staying with the released version for now. What a great piece of SW, I just wish I had learned a vector tool sooner.

best regards

JimR

So far so good:


I have made it crash some times already, is that to be expected?

JimR

Looks nice, you're fast.

There are always bugs although developers weed out all known crash bugs before the official release. 0.46 seems to have some that slipped undetected. If you can reproduce it with simple steps (for example limit the crash cause to an option in a very simple document) you can report it to the bug tracker, although chances are if it's something common it's already been reported and probably fixed in the development builds.

Here's the bug tracker for Inkscape https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/