The design I'm making consists of a piece of paper with a curled ear. It's not supposed to be blank, but we haven't decided what should go on it, a text, one of several drawings, or a pattern. The thing is, whatever goes on the paper has to curl around with the paper's "ear".

It would be much easier to decide what should go on it if I could place every possibility on the already drawn paper and see what looks best, but there are many different possibilities. Is there a way I could create a transformation mask that would "make things curl" and then apply it to the drawings as I try them on for background? Or do I have to transform every single drawing/text/pattern individually?

Just to make it clear (I'm not a native English speaker, I apologize if this sounds rude): I'm not asking how to transform objects so that they look like they're curling, I'm asking how to apply the same transformation to several successive objects.

Thanks in advance for any answer! (Even if it is "yes, you have to transform them individually"; I just really want to know.)

Hello
In Inkscape 0.91 there is an option in the Main Bar > Objects > transform : there you can apply a transformation to each object separately.

On the other hand, honestly, I didn't understand your question. English isn't my first language neither. What are you meaning when you say "curl"?.

It's always good to post a sample file or files, or screens of the effect you want to achieve

Greetings

It depends on the specific transformation that you're making. I would say there's probably not an easy way to do it, except individually. But because of the translation, "transformation" might not be telling us the whole story.

Generally, "transformation" brings to mind the things you can do with the Transform dialog, which are Move, Scale, Rotate, Skew. And there's a transform Matrix tab, that I have no idea how to use. It might be a way to apply all of those previous 4 things all at once. And if that's the case, that might be your answer. Here's the manual info, near the bottom of this page: http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... forms.html

However you might mean something besides moving, scaling, rotating and/or skewing. For example, changing the color could be described as transforming an object. But color falls more under the category of "style" in Inkscape. If all the changes you want to make fall under "style", then there's an Inkscape command Paste Style. So after you copy an object with the style you want, you can quickly paste that style onto successive objects with a click or keystroke.

Or for a different approach, no matter what you're doing to the ear. If you select all the possibilities for the drawing to go on the ear, you can apply whatever you do, to all of them at once.

But so much depends on exactly what you're doing and what your process is. From what you've described, the multiple selection should work. But I can't say for sure, until we know specifically what you're doing to the ear.

Thank you both for your answers! Unfortunately, I think I'm not making myself clear...

Here's what I did: I had a rectangular drawing. I resized it to fit where I wanted. Then, I applied an envelope deformation to slightly curve one piece of one side of this drawing. The final result was exactly what I wanted, it looks like a paper with a drawing on it and one ear curving over it. What I want to do now is copy this transformation I did to this drawing and apply it to other drawings. Like in Photoshop, where you can save a transformation path and apply it to future drawings. Is there a way to do that?

I'm not on my home computer now, so I can't post an image, but I'll do it as soon as I get home.

Which functionality did you use for the envelope deformation? The extension "Modify Path" -> "Envelope" ignores curves in the rectangle you use as envelope, so that can't be it...

Must have been the LPE then.

In the Live Path Effects dialog, you can use the copy icon to copy the kind of deformation, and then select another path, add the same path effect to it (Ctrl+Shift+F7), then use the paste icon next to the copy icon for pasting the control path (the 'transformation') to the other path.
Just be sure to copy the correct control path from the four possibilities.

Yep, that did it. Thank you so much!

Just out of curiosity, though, is there a way to combine several transformations in a single operation? Like, the resizing and the envelope deformation? I imagine it would be handy, if I had a more complex series of transformations.

Not that I know of.

There's always the option to use the command line interface to script a few things - I'm not sure this would work for live path effects, though... Couldn't find them there. But maybe you will want to use it for something else: https://inkscape.org/doc/inkscape-man.html

You can see what is available by printing



(some of those will only open dialogs in the gui - you must choose something that does not require you to enter parameters... Those that need parameters can take them from your current config files - corresponding to the last settings that you have used)

OK, thanks