Hi,

I'm trying to wrap my head around how the scaling and viewport works in the Inkscape Document Settings.
Anyone who can point me to some useful documentation?

I tried changing the scale to 25, but a 2 meter line still didn't fit on my A4 paper... (by about 1.79 m actually). So the scaled down line wasn't 8 cm on the paper...

Hi.

As far as I understand there is a unit in which the coordinates are stored and there is a display unit on top of it (achieved by a viewbox).
Meaning, most likely the coordinates are represented in px values, and with the recent upgrades mm got to be the default display unit.
That was meant to solve the inconvenience of the previous versions default px user units but A4 page size.

Scale doesn't represent anything else -your drawing in 1:25 won't scale every objects/user units on screen, but when changing the value it can affect every previously drawn object's sizes. Their "stored" sizes are scaled accordingly to fit the user units.

Recently inkscape moved from 90 dpi to 96 dpi, which results in an odd scale factor -96 dot per inch=96 px per 25,4 mm=3,77953, with the default mm display units.
Changing that value may mess up extensions as they use the "stored" coordinates in px-s, as discussed here (Old extensions need a unitouu update -whatever that may be?).



All in all, if you set scale factor to 1 and display units to mm, you can draw in 1:1 scale.
Then, when finished drawing, if you change the scale factor, every object will be resized accordingly.

Does it really work? Not really, inkscape is not a cad program, it has huge limitations in the size of the objects/accuracy, number of digits stored/even the rendering produces extreme ghosting if the rendered area is out of the 80000 px range.

(Cad programs don't necessarily scale objects and change measures once you change the scale factor of the document.
It's the other way around, you draw in 1:1 scale and the document scale setting only affects the output size.)

This is the only documentation I know about (I wrote it the other day). It doesn't explain everything, but does inform how to change the units for your document. I would say this should work for 98% of users. (only if you want to do something like disproportional scale, should you do something different)(If that's the case, please contact developers via mailing list or IRC.)

https://inkscape.org/en/learn/faq/#how- ... ersion-092

I've been involved in a discussion on the mailing list about this (TD too) (and maybe Moini too, can't remember for sure). It seems that some developers apparently used this reasoning for the current handling of Display Units. Since A4 is the most popular document size, and since A4 is basically a mm based size, then Inkscape ought to use mm for it's native units. This requires the kind of steps explained in the FAQ, to change the Display Units. Previously, changing the Display Units required 1 click, no matter what you wanted to change to or from. Now we have this complicated and incomprehensible routine. (At least for ordinary users like me, it's incomprehensible.)

I've argued that A4 is not the most poplular page size (I've literally never used it.) I think that Inkscape should not be groomed towards any particular use case (i.e. - offline vs online use - real world units vs px). There are many uses for Inkscape and it should be easy to use for all, and not convenient for only some. Anyway, I've made a feature request to revert to the type of unit handling that's been used in all of Inkscape's history (as far as I remember anyway).

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1719162

If you think Inkscape should go back to the previous, easy to understand, easy to use, flexible way of handling units, please visit that page, and click "This bug affects me too" button (or it's something close to that, near the top).

(I suspect it's mostly we "ordinary" users who are affected by this. And that's the same group which will be less likely to speak up. So please don't be shy. Clicking "this affect me too" is something like voting. There's no consequence, except maybe if there are enough users "voting", the developers will revert to the previous system.)

Errrrmmmm... not quite.

Scaling in inkscape is correctly described in the wiki:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... n_Inkscape

...and Marc's multi-segment tome is technically correct, but can be summarized with one statement: units and scale are complicated and confusing.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/units-part-i-13563546

https://www.patreon.com/posts/units-part-ii-13566508

https://www.patreon.com/posts/units-part-iii-13741251

https://www.patreon.com/posts/units-part-iv-13993147

(Articles written by Marc Jeanmougin, for his patrons on Patreon and for
the whole Inkscape community)


To scale a 1:1 drawing to another scale, check out this extension:
https://inkscape.org/en/~Moini/%E2%98%8 ... own-length

Please let us know how things work for you.

TD

The linked extension doesn't work with Inkscape 0.92.2 as well as its modified version:
https://gitlab.com/su-v/inkscape-realsc ... fectCompat (by su_v)

Thanks for the heads-up.

(hope the contents was clear, I meant that su_v's version works better. We got stuck discussing the merge, it's still WIP.)

Haha... ok, I see the potential for confusion in the phrasing... "as well" can mean "as effectively", or "also". Which, in this context would mean very different things.

Thanks!

Errrrmmmm... not quite.

Well, I'm trying my best to understand these things. All I know for sure is that this new arrangement doesn't work very well. I don't understand why we have to have mm for native units. And I think it would be better if we went back to the old way of unit handling.

In any case, I'm done with discussing it. I feel like I've conveyed to the developers that the current arrangement is too hard for many, if not most users to understand. And to use. Now I will be quiet, and let them try to find a better way.