I tried to make the title generic because I've seen the problem in more than one place in my dim memory. But today it was with "Pattern Along Path". You click on the "Edit on-canvas" option of the "Pattern Source" options in the "Pattern Along Path" effect and... nothing happens. You click it harder, which of course doesn't help.

The problem is, InkScape has placed the pattern for you to edit in the upper left corner of your document, which doesn't happen to be in view. The result is utter mystification, inspiring a strong feeling that the product is just broken. I really hate that feeling which, to be fair, can be encountered in any graphics editing program I've ever used in one situation or another.

What to do? Unfortunately, I suspect there are some number of other situations that are clearly in the same category of problem (though this one happens to involve two objects (path and pattern) and others may involve only one, not sure). So probably it would be best to compile a list of all such problems and try to provide a unified solution.

A very cheap and simple (and not highly satisfactory) patch would be to at least check for a non-visible pattern when the user clicks the "Edit on-canvas" option, and update the status line to say "Scroll to upper left of document to see pattern". Not great, but at least there is *some* indication *somewhere* on the screen that you are now editing an object you can't see. When I put it like that, it seems obvious that it should be a goal for the software to never instigate a situation where an off-screen object is put into edit mode.

Is there something (more) unpleasant that would happen if the software were to just position the editable object in the upper left corner of the current view instead of the current document?

I know it would be jarring to automatically resize/reposition the current view when the user just clicks on an option button, but silently leaving the user mystified is not a great alternative.

Hopefully there's a better solution possible than I've thought of so far.

For this particular problem, with the pattern handles showing up in the top, left corner of the page border, the solution is to just grab the X handle with the mouse, and drag. All the handles move at the same time, so you can put them closer to the object, so the object and pattern handles are both visible.

As far as I can tell, when the pattern is one that is packed with Inkscape, the handles show in the top, left corner of the page border. If it's a custom pattern, the handles show up where the original object that you converted to pattern was, at the time you converted to pattern.

There is a frustrating bug that can make the handles appear just about anywhere though. And that same bug can cause the objects that are drawn by various extensions, to appear outside the visible part of the canvas. It also can affect tiled clones, and spray the clones all over the canvas, in certain situations! Until that bug is fixed, we just have to be aware of this, and remember to look around, if we click a button and nothing seems to happen. (It's a fairly long-standing bug, which might mean it's hard to fix, but that would be a guess on my part.)

I'm not sure about other situations where an element is out of view. You'd have to give specific examples, before we could comment.

I guess I don't see that as a solution, because my definition of the problem is that user has no idea what's going on when a button promises to let them edit something, but appears to do absolutely nothing.

Another case I hit today is the handles for editing pattern fills. Wasted literally an hour looking through similar posts about being unable to edit pattern fills until I found the clue that the handles might not be visible. That was indeed the problem.

This is a slightly different case because you invoke the handles by clicking the node editing tool, which has ambiguous meaning: maybe you just wanted to edit the object itself rather than its pattern fill. In which case, you don't care that the other handles seem to be missing.

Hello,
Certainlly it's an interface issue. I also find very un-intuitive that the handles of pattern, or of certain live path effects appears very far from the parent object.

If you go here:
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... s-Patterns

and dig, you will see:

[The handles will appear when an object with a Pattern fill is selected and the node or one of the shape tools is active. The handles will appear on the original objects that defined the Pattern, or the former location of those objects if they have been moved or deleted (unless the Pattern has been previously adjusted). In the case of built-on Patterns they will appear in the upper-left corner of the canvas.

...

which for me, I recognize it's not enough.

An additional information could be: "If you don't see the pattern handles on the object, after double clicking it and seeing that the handles of the object appears, you can use the view canvas keyboards shortcuts to locate them, that is, press "1", "2", "3","4", or "5" in your keyboard". That's what I've learned after "test and error", and searching and asking in this forum... and others...

At this moment, I'm pesimistic about we the users could help you more with this issue. The next step i think is try to contact the developers for suggessting an improvement related to that, or see if already a fix is planed, or a better work around
Related with the above:
https://inkscape.org/en/develop/bug-management/

Good luck

I agree that this is a frustrating situation, when you click, and nothing seems to happen. In some ways, as you have pointed out, this is almost a pervasive situation. At least for new Inkscape users, it certainly seems so, sometimes. I remember when I first started learning to use Inkscape. It seemed like every other click did nothing!

I think it might take someone who works on nothing else but this issue, to fix them all. Or maybe even a team. Maybe a project for GSoC or Hackfest or funded development.

And I also agree with hulf, that we, as Inkscape users, are unable to fix anything. Here is info on how to file bug report/new feature request: https://inkscape.org/en/contribute/report-bugs/