Hi. Thanks for a great program. I just want to flesh out some ideas I got. Some of the ideas might be workarounds for but I doesn't know about any (not talking about manually deleting a lot of objects).


Spray tool - Spray into a limited area
Here's the idea. Make one or more small objects that shall be used as spray source. Then draw a rectangle or any other figure, could be a closed path as well. This one must be much bigger than source.
Place the big object under the spray source and have a chechk the button saying button "limited area defined" or something similar.
Now: when spraying only the area inside the big object will fill up with spray clones (or whatever you call those smal sprayed objects).
Also, the sprayed objects shouldn't be clipped (like set clip function does), but only objects that fits as whole objects are sprayed onto the big object.

And opposite of the above
That is, any sprayed object can't exist onto a bigger figure that is further down in z-order (if also selected).

Tool to remove overlapping objects
If a lot of objects is already sprayed and organised so that the artist is satisfied, there should be an alternative to "set clip". When adding a figure on top, the new tool should remove any small objects that is onto the bigger object (whole objec or partlial). Opposed to "set clip" there will not be any clipped objects. Any small objects is either deleted or not deleted.

Oposite of "set clip"
That is - instead of removing every part of objects that is outside an figure, remove everything that is inside a figure - will leave a whole in a collection of objects.

Export many times - increment number
I have APNG Anime Maker to put several png's together to an animation. When exporting dosens of images from Inkscape with increasing end number (t.ex image001.png) it takes a lot of time to do just the renaming in export dialog box. Therefore, there should be added a tab to the Export dialog box alowing user to define a image name mask, so that each time a user click on a button or a hotkey, a PNG file is stored with just an increasing end number.

Export area covered by a rectangle
When "Custom" button in Export dialog box is activated, the coordinates should appear just like a set of rectangular guides. That is, four guides that cover an area that will be exported. And those should act just like normal guides, exept they can't rotate of course.

Export everything exept selected
This is just a variation of the above suggestion.
This is me having a rectangle that rule what I wish to export (export selected). I use to have a non-filled black stroked rectangle. When I export this to a png, the png will have outer borders that represent the selected rectangle.
I se many other uses of such a feature.

Connect nodes from different paths together
I know this is a feature request that has being around for years now. I also know that the grand answer to that is "it is impossible to implement because of limitation in svg native format", or something like that. But hey! Inkscape doesn't save in "native format" anyway, does it? An Inkscape svg file is as far I know a regular svg file with some extra tags, not standard in native svg format.

So here we have, let say two simple paths, each with 3 nodes. Suppose that the middle nodes is snapping on to each other.
Why couldn't there been a option in node tool where both nodes where selected, saying "merge nodes"?

Don't answer on this before reading further. I have an idea how to make this out.

I've seen in xml editor for a pat that the "d" tag is has letter "M" followed by the coordinates to all nodes in that path.
Why doesn't just add a new tag and call it "MergedTo". That new tag should contain the ID to the other path AND the index to the node on the other path.

When selecting one of the nodes and moving it, Inkscape should also move the other node as it was one single node. Still the user could be able to edit the node handles on the nodes independently of each other. Moving the whole path will cause the other path to deformate, unless both paths is selected.

Both fill and stroke has linear gradient
Here's a possible bug, but I'm not sure it's actually a bug.

If I draw a figure and make both fill and stroke linear gradient (LG hereafter for short), when switching to then both handles is bundled together. This make it very hard to edit both fill and stroke gradients on same figure.

The workaround for this is after setting fill to LG, then move both handles (assume ) down, and then set stroke to LG. When athe is active, there will be two set of handles.

Also If I move one of the end handles for stroke LG close one of the fill LG handles, the two handles will snap and it's impossible to separate those handles. When this happends, any further attempts to edit fill LG and stroke LG will be a lost battle for control. I cannot understand why the end handles will stick together (snap) in first place.

Bounding boxe snap points should be able to snap to more than just other bounding boxes snap points
Also with this case, there is a grand explanation that kill any hope that this one day will come true.
As far I can remember, a snap point to a bounding box is a separate object, compared to other snap points - and therefor it's a huge amount of work to acomplish this.
But since i now just flesh out my wishes, I add this.

Huge number of files
After deleting the language files, it's still 2800+ files in Inkscape program folder. I strongly beleive merging some files and make the file count less, the startup time may decrease.

Dynamic buttons and menus
I want to beleive this is somewhere on the road map, but I add this.
There is many buttons in Inkscape I almost never use. Two good exapmples is and button. Also the isn't used because I use mouse wheel to zoom.
Ther should be a menu that make it possible for user to activate and deactivate different buttons, on all menus.
Also, on very small screens, the last buttons on the menus is hided (but I can get them by select the tool menu arrow).
Not so important, but I add it on the board.

Spiral - Cannot set a fixed distance between each turn
It's a fun tool, but I almost never use the because of it's handling.
So I cannot really control a spiral the way I want to have it without spending a lot of time trying and failing.

More possibilities to add hotkeys to buttons
There is two separate problems/wishes.
1 - There is some hotkeys that take use of the Shift+ [ and ] buttons. I beleive that many users with non-english keyboard layout won't actually have access to those keys. On my keyboard it will return the characters ( and ) instead.
2 - Possible to assign hotkeys for every button, and selecting item from dropdown menu. This will solve the problem mentioned above, AND in my case, it will have a great impact on my work efficiency because any keyboard button take less time to search than lead the mouse pointer over the corresponding button.

Clones is generally unstable
This is by means a well known bug. I do something with a drawing, and some or all clones either dissapear or they just moves to a random position away from the canvas.
The worse thing is that it's often not reproducible. An example - I changed the canvas size, and suddenly all clones just waporized - gone. Later when reading through some bug repports I learned that if all clones and their source object was located on same layer, this would probably not happend.

Drag to change canvas size
Have said it before I think. When I draw something, I often wish the canvas dimensions to be multiple of ten. When having a grid distance and if canvas was possible to drag and snap to grids, that would be just great. I do understand that if that feature was implemented, dragging the bottom or left side would make a change to all object's coordinates. Still, for most users I think that is no concern.
Personally I like to be able to adjust border of my drawings, so I spend pretty much time to manually move the drawing (all objects) to lower left on the canvas so distance to canvas border looks right, and then adjusting the whole canvas height and width by trying and failing until it looks right.
Nevertheless, I've being pretty good at this and doesn't spend that much time on it, but it would be a great great feature.


End - thanks for reading
I know most of this features have been discussed before, but I just felt to collect it at one thread. Feel free to write aditional comments on the different points I have.