Hi Friends,
Snapping has given me fits, over the few years since I've been learning Inkscape. And little by little, and especially with version 0.47 when snapping was majorly overhauled, I'm learning its secrets and how to use it effectively. So to that end, I think I just discovered another snap "secret".

I have my preferences set to snap to the node nearest the pointer. What I was working on just now, is a rather complex closed path (with fill and no stroke) and its duplicate (stroke and no fill). And I needed them to be exactly the latter on top of the former. So snap is the perfect tool to do that. I set up to snap bounding box corners. Because of the size of the object and the zoom factor....ok, let me get a screen shot, because it will be hard to describe clearly.



I grabbed the fill-only object (gold), on its right side, closer to the bottom, expecting the lower right corner of the bounding box to snap to the same of the other (although perhaps I was wrong about that -- more later). But I did not think I would have to scroll over. Even though they appeared to line up perfectly, there was no snap, apparently because the snapping target was outside of the viewable canvas. As I set about to solve the problem, I did scroll over, and then the bottom, right bounding box corners snapped as I expected. So it looks to me like, if the snapping target is not in a viewable portion of the canvas, the snap can't happen.

Now, when I said I had my prefs set to snap the node nearest the pointer, I kind of assumed "node" means snapping point. But maybe that setting only applies to the snapping of paths or nodes, not of bounding boxes? So I'm not sure about that. But in any case, I could not get a snap until I scrolled the target into view.

Is that expected behavior?
Thanks, as always for your helpful comments

brynn wrote:Is that expected behavior?

I don't know.

But - after trying to reproduce your example (I remembered having noticed this myself recently) with both 0.47 and 0.48(+devel), I can confirm that the behavior has changed:

• In 0.47, the bbox corner snaps to another bbox corner even if the snap target is not inside the current view within the canvas area.
• In 0.48, snapping is restricted to the visible snap targets within the canvas area.

This change affects snapping bounding box corners as well as snapping nodes and handles.

Snapping drives me nutty. Thanks for posting this, I would not have thought to drag it into the view.
I wish there were an option of not snapping at all, stored in preferences, as I tend to snap when I don't want to, or maybe I just need to update my personal default file.

Actually you CAN turn off snapping altogether! Snapping was majorly overhauled with version 0.47. So if you could let us know what version you have, we can tell you how to do it. (Also, if you were to search my username with "snap", you'd get a whole bunch of topics I've posted about snapping over the last few years. As I said, it has given me fits, but is now working like a dream!)