This is a read-only archive of the inkscapeforum.com site. You can search for info here or post new questions and comments at I have an idea for a two plugins that would greatly improve my work, and I'm sure some of you might also find them useful.
The first idea would be a Object/Symbol Library (think like the sidebar in Adobe Flash, where if you draw something you can save it, name it and easily copy it from the sidebar onto the canvas). My work boils down to dropping a rectangular shape (like 30x55 mm, but they can be as big as 150x150 mm) onto the canvas, adding some text to it (like, 5-7 lines, size 10pt) fiddling with the text (alignment, face, style, spacing, kerning) and making it fit within the shape. Theoretically, each shape I make is unique, but most of them follow a common template (as in, the first line is always bold, the second is italics, the third has reduced letter spacing because it's a long number that has to fit in one line, etc.). Up to now I have a "master" .svg with the shapes I need and it fills my needs, but having the symbols organized and categorized (Rectangles, Squares, Circles, Dimensions/Diameter, Lines of Text, Bordered/Border-less, etc.) would make it that much easier.
On a related note - sometimes we have to pull the shapes from an archive and currently we have to have a hard-copy of the shapes from a given day, find the shape on the hard-copy, get the hard-copy date and pull the shape from the file from that date. Tedious. Is there a way to search through .svg files for a string of text (as long as it isn't converted into curves, of course)?
The second plugin that I have an idea for would be a placement optimizer. As in, all the shapes on a page (or within a selection) would be rearranged to form the smallest possible footprint on the material. To simplify things, most of the shapes are rectangular, square or circular. No oddities.
I may be grasping at straws here, but these two bits of code would save me at least an hour of redundant work per day
