After discovering a problem regarding the postscript export of an .svg file with a LaTeX compiling process I decided to upgrade Inkscape for version 0.48.2 r9819 to the latest version. This fixed the original problem, but since the update the alignment of objects seems to be broken somehow. E.g. I draw a circle anywhere on a page and want to align it horizontally and vertically relative to the page. Selecting and doing the first alignment (for example horizontally) is no problem, but when trying to align a second time nothing happens. To same goes for every other sort of alignment, the first one goes without any problem, but I'm stuck on the second one. Only clicking elsewhere in the window or changing "align relative to" to another than the selected option lets me do the second alignment.
The overall performance of Inkscape seems to have decreased also, sometimes it feels like the program is freezing for moments...

Is there a way of fixing the alignment issue or is this behaviour intended and I'm missing a point here?

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

I haven't heard of any bugs, but I'll search as soon as I make sure of all the precise facts about it. It sounds like you're using the Align and Distribute dialog, correct? And then it sounds like you're setting Align > Relative To, either to First Selected or Last Selected. So it's very important to select the objects in the proper order, indicated by your "Relative To" choice. But if you're clicking e.g. "Center on vertical axis" button, you should be able to immediately click "Center on horizontal axis" without any problems.

In case of a bug, would you please tell use your Inkscape version and operating system? I know you said "most current version", but that could either be the current stable release (0.48.4) or the current development version (0.49).

Now I'll do a quick test with my 0.48.4 on Windows...... Well, no problems here. Of course if you happen to have picked up the dev version, you could potentially run into any kind of problems

Now I'll search Launchpad...... And I'll post this much now, and edit to post my search results

Edit
Ok, are you aligning text? In my test, I just used shape objects. Let me try with text. No it seems to work fine for me. But I did find this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/167228. Perhaps it doesn't affect Windows, but I'm not sure. It looks like author is using a Linux type of os. Also, I don't understand what the bug author calls "under-dotted "A"". I don't see anything like that in A and D dialog, or my keyboard. And it's possible the bug has been fixed, for all I know.

I didn't exactly peruse this list, so there may be another bug that pertains to this issue.

I can't discern anything you might be doing wrong, or don't understand correctly. Hopefully someone else will know something about this issue, or be able to help.

I'm using Windows7 Professional (64bit) as OS, as I said the current version of Inkscape I'm using without any problem is 0.48.2 r9819. The "upgraded versions" I tried to use are build 0.48.4 r9939 as well as the latest developer's version of the programm. In order to test if it's only a problem of an specific .svg file I created one with my working version of Inkscape (Test as well as shape objects, too). No alignment issues were found here, different alignments are carried out immediately one after another, even with different options set at "relative to". Openinng the SAME file with 0.48.4 (and even lower versions, eg. 0.48.3, too!) cause the first alignment to be done properly, but the second one won't be realized until "relative to" is changed and then changed back to the option desired...

Pretty confusing....

Well, based on the info you're providing, together with my inability to reproduce the issue, I guess I'm left to conclude there's a bug with the Inkscape versions you've mentioned, together with something about your system (probably operating system).

Anyone else with Win7Pro care to test?

~suv is our bug guru. Maybe I'll edit your title to include "bug?" which hopefully will attract ~suv to reply

After trying other version I can tell that a downgrade to 0.46 shows full fuctionality of the alignment options, while higher versions and even the portable one show the described issue.
Another phenomenon not obvious to me at first sight is the following:

In order to change the option Relative to you usually click with the left mouse button and the dropdown menu opens. When I do this, the menu opens and closes immediatly. Only if I click and hold the menu stays open and lets me change the entry.

Hi.

On my system (Win 7 professional) - Inkscape 0.48+devel r12292 -all alignment works as expected - the "Relative to:" dropdown menu works OK as well

Have you tried to delete your default.svg file (Mine is in; C:\Users\Ragnar\AppData\Roaming\inkscape\templates\)
and the preferences.xml file? (Mine is in; C:\Users\Ragnar\AppData\Roaming\inkscape\)

( Might be an idéa to make copies first - )

RGDS
Ragnar

Understood!

Thank you very much!

Despite annoying ~suv (for which I apologize profusely) it would seem there's no known bug. I don't have any more ideas myself. Maybe Ragnar can help??

Hurz wrote:Openinng the SAME file with 0.48.4 (and even lower versions, eg. 0.48.3, too!) cause the first alignment to be done properly, but the second one won't be realized until "relative to" is changed and then changed back to the option desired...

Hurz wrote:Another phenomenon not obvious to me at first sight is the following:
In order to change the option Relative to you usually click with the left mouse button and the dropdown menu opens. When I do this, the menu opens and closes immediatly. Only if I click and hold the menu stays open and lets me change the entry.

Inkscape 0.48.3.1 and later packages for Windows (0.48.4, current development snapshot builds) use newer versions of the GTK+ stack (GTK+ is the toolkit which Inkscape uses for the GUI) than Inkscape 0.48.2 and older packages - this could possibly have introduced some changes in the Windows backend of GTK+ [*] which affect the interaction with GUI elements in (docked) dialogs in Inkscape.

[*] In quick tests on OS X 10.7.5, Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10 and 13.04 the 'Align and Distribute' dialog works as expected with Inkscape 0.48.2, 0.48.3.1, 0.48.4 and current development builds. On OS X I tested various versions and both supported backends of the GTK+ toolkit (X11, Quartz).

~suv wrote:Inkscape 0.48.3.1 and later packages for Windows (0.48.4, current development snapshot builds) use newer versions of the GTK+ stack (GTK+ is the toolkit which Inkscape uses for the GUI) than Inkscape 0.48.2 and older packages - this could possibly have introduced some changes in the Windows backend of GTK+ [*] which affect the interaction with GUI elements in (docked) dialogs in Inkscape.

Yeah, after reading bugtrackerposts for a while I found several people having issues with buttons beeing disabled in versions > 0.48.2. I'll try to update GTK, but as I'm not into the whole thing I'll first have to figure out how to do so. Thank you for giving the hint about GTK!