**Moderator Note -- This topic has been split out of another one. I have tried to move all the comments that could not be cleanly split out of individual messages. But it still may not read through smoothly. The other part of it is here, in case I missed something: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7495**

Seams like another bug. Had the same problem before. Also the Placement of Gradients behaves strange sometimes. Needs definitely more fixes. Currently i have a lot of small issues using it. One one of them are the segments on the end of the Path. They are fairly often not selectable and deselecting nodes is a pain. It just does not work the simple way.

@~suv: Yes the Edit > Paste style sometimes put the gradient elsewhere (usually i use Ctrl+Shift+V). Sometimes it is so far away that you can't even see it. As far as i remember this already happend in 0.46, but in very few cases. May be an issue while copying the previous object. Since it was mostly fixed if i copied it again. Deselecting nodes in 0.46 worked flawless. Seams as holding Strg+Shift is ignored.

niabot wrote:Deselecting nodes in 0.46 worked flawless.

Which nodes, in the node tool? Or are you still talking about gradients? If this is about the node tool: do you have the transformation handles toggled on? In normal mode (default), it works as in the old tool (0.46, 0.47); with the transformation handles visible, use 'Shift+click' to deselect a node (like you deselect an object from a selection in the select tool).

niabot wrote:Seams as holding Strg+Shift is ignored.

Needs more information - what are you trying to do i.e. with which command do you want to use this combination of modifiers?

~suv wrote:

niabot wrote:Deselecting nodes in 0.46 worked flawless.

Which nodes, in the node tool? Or are you still talking about gradients? If this is about the node tool: do you have the transformation handles toggled on? In normal mode (default), it works as in the old tool (0.46, 0.47); with the transformation handles visible, use 'Shift+click' to deselect a node (like you deselect an object from a selection in the select tool).

The Problem is simple. I have about 100 (maybe more) Nodes (a path) I select 50 of them but want to remove 10 nodes form the selection again. (After that 40 nodes should be selected) Usually i pressed Strg + Shift and dragged a rectangle with the mouse. All Nodes inside would now be deselected. In 0.48 this does not work. You can't deselect nodes this way. Only one by one, which can be a pain.

With transformation handles on it is even more difficult. In the case that all nodes are selected, you can't even deselect or select a single one.

~suv wrote:

niabot wrote:Seams as holding Strg+Shift is ignored.

Needs more information - what are you trying to do i.e. with which command do you want to use this combination of modifiers?

See above

niabot wrote:The Problem is simple. I have about 100 (maybe more) Nodes (a path) I select 50 of them but want to remove 10 nodes form the selection again. (After that 40 nodes should be selected) Usually i pressed Strg + Shift and dragged a rectangle with the mouse. All Nodes inside would now be deselected. In 0.48 this does not work. You can't deselect nodes this way. Only one by one, which can be a pain.

I just tested with Inkscape 0.46 and 0.47 (official builds for Mac OS X): On both versions 'Shift+Ctrl+drag' does not deselect the nodes within the dragged frame from the highlighted (selected) nodes.

Do you still have the version installed that worked that way for you? On which platform?

niabot wrote:With transformation handles on it is even more difficult. In the case that all nodes are selected, you can't even deselect or select a single one.

As already mentioned in my previous comment, in 0.48 with transformation handles visible, deselect (or add) single nodes with 'Shift+click' (works for me to deselect individual nodes with either type of selection btw).

I cannot reproduce «In the case that all nodes are selected, you can't even deselect or select a single one.» in 0.48.0 and later development versions.

~suv wrote:I just tested with Inkscape 0.46 and 0.47 (official builds for Mac OS X): On both versions 'Shift+Ctrl+drag' does not deselect the nodes within the dragged frame from the highlighted (selected) nodes.

Do you still have the version installed that worked that way for you? On which platform?

It was a self compiled Version of Inkscape 0.46 on Ubuntu 8.10. Some weaks ago i upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10. Unluckily i did not make a backup from /opt because most programs had the same or better version already. So i forgot and i'm a little pissed now that i did not. But I'm 100% sure that it worked in Inkscape 0.46. Since i created this picture (Warning: Commons can't display it, look at the PNG version or open the svg with caution ^^) and all dots in the background where created with clones that i combined to multiple objects with multiple paths/contours. I could not create the pattern at once (limits from clones (rows/colums) where to low and it took minutes just to create a 100x100 part of clones. Since i needed to do it multiple times on different parts i had overlapping regions. Since the lines of the pattern where diagonal i could not select them all at once (Box Select). But sometimes i selected to much or too less. And it was no problem to remove multiple Nodes or Objects with Shift + Ctrl + Mousedrag from a selection. So im very strongly convinced that i was able to do it.

~suv wrote:As already mentioned in my previous comment, in 0.48 with transformation handles visible, deselect (or add) single nodes with 'Shift+click' (works for me to deselect individual nodes with either type of selection btw).

I cannot reproduce «In the case that all nodes are selected, you can't even deselect or select a single one.» in 0.48.0 and later development versions.

Tried if on a new file. It worked then i did some more things and suddenly it did not. Reselected the object and it worked again. Looks completely random to me.

niabot wrote:So im very strongly convinced that i was able to do it.

Maybe you have been secretly hacking on Inkscape's sources and added rubber-band deselection of nodes and objects yourself?

I checked in the manual for older versions and the current ones (0.47 and the draft for 0.48), as well as the keyboard shortcut references: I can't find any described method how to rubber-band-deselect multiple nodes (or objects) from a selection - only 'Shift+clicking' single nodes or objects.
You can add multiple nodes or objects to a selection with 'Shift+drag'. Additionally, the 'Shift' modifier when used with a mouse drag does prevent the selection from getting moved unintentionally if you start the rubber-band selection over an object or path, but it does not invert the selection of objects within the rubber-band frame (i.e. adding/removing from the selection depending on selection state).
The 'Ctrl' modifier is not related to adding to/removing from the selection: it triggers 'Move' instead, more precisely a constrained move of the current selection along the x- or y-axes.

And I opened your file with Inkscape 0.46 and with the latest build from the development branch: there are two big paths (with 10'000 nodes each), and several groups (each containing 2500 or fewer clones) - on three background layers - for the halftone effect. Deselecting multiple nodes from a selection of nodes of one of the big paths or deselecting multiple clones from a selection within their group does not work, at least not with regular, unpatched builds (on Mac OS X - though I'm not sure it could be a platform-related feature).

I also searched in the bug tracker, and amazingly I didn't find any mention (bug or feature request) of removing multiple nodes or objects from a selection by rubber-band-selecting within the current selection. OTOH e.g. in this earlier comment here in the forum it is mentioned as missing feature…

IMHO it could be a reasonable feature request, but maybe we can first figure out if the feature indeed got lost in one of the recent releases or if it is/was somehow platform-dependent (like e.g. window manager/X11 sending different signals with the same combination of keys and mouse clicks).

I will try to compile 0.46 on my system, hoping i'm still able to. Lets see if it has this feature, I'm very sure i was using without changing the code.

@InkCat - sorry for high-jacking your topic!

@admin - maybe someone with admin rights for the forum can move the discussion about node selection into a new topic?

niabot wrote:I will try to compile 0.46 on my system, hoping i'm still able to. Lets see if it has this feature, I'm very sure i was using without changing the code.

Here some information found in the archives of the inkscape-devel mailing list (seems you'd have to go back to Inkscape 0.35 or 0.36 to get back that type of selection toggle):

1. from 2003 (!):

   On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 04:25, bulia byak wrote:(…)
   
   While at it, I changed the behavior of shift-rubberband. Previously it
   toggled the selected status of all objects it affected, now it always adds
   to selection. Rationale: the semantics of rubberband ("include everything
   within this box") and toggle ("deselect what was selected and vice versa")
   do not mix, imho. Especially given simple rubberband (without shift) always
   selects objects, regardless of their past status. Shift-click, however,
   still toggles selection status, so you can select many objects with
   (shift-)rubberband and then deselect individual ones with shift-clicks.
   Comments?
   
   And the main change which was the reason to dig into this code at all: now
   if Shift is pressed before you start dragging, you always get rubberband,
   even if you start from an object. I admit I stole this from Xara, but it's
   VERY convenient. Without it, if you had a big background object in your
   drawing, you simply could not use rubberband because you always ended up
   dragging the background. Now you can, just press Esc and then
   Shift-rubberband for a new selection.
   

2. from 2007:

   JiHO wrote:

   bulia byak wrote:

   JiHO wrote:=> Shift+Drag should _toggle_ the selection of what is inside the
   selection rectangle and not just add. I cannot count the times when I
   would have had the use for this behavior in the past. In addition it
   is more consistent with Shift+clic toggle behavior.
   

   Also disagree. I think the toggle behavior is only acceptable for a
   single object where you clearly see its current status. With bulk
   operations, it would be a disaster. I often do several shift+drags
   when I want to include many small objects in selection - and as a
   rule, my drags _overlap_ "just in case" so I don't miss anything. With
   yout proposal, overlapped areas will be deselected back - which will
   be a royal mess.
   
   What we need instead is a unconditional "subtract from selection" (not
   toggle!) mode for rubberband and touch selection. But we've absolutely
   run out of keyboard shortcuts for this
   

   I agree it could get messy when trying to do what you describe but I
   had the opposite experience when trying to select many small objects,
   in particular when they are on another bigger one: I would like to be
   able to do a first broad selection and then crop out some parts of
   the selection from the borders by shift-dragging. But I agree that
   the best behavior would be to have a "subtract from selection" mode.
   

IMHO - based on these quotes, it's not worth rebuilding Inkscape 0.46 to see if - on your platform - it includes this specific selection feature (unless you have other reasons to return to that specific version (lots of bugs got fixed since - ofc I'm not saying that current stable is bug-free )).

Then it should be implemented again. It's a feature i know from basically all graphic programs including Blender, Gimp, and so on. I tried to compile 0.46 under Ubuntu 10.10. After looking at the error messages i quickly decided not to continue. Anyway it would be nice to have this feature back again. Also a free selection (drawing a circle...) could be really nice.

How it works (on the selection issue): If you hold Shift you select multiple objects with the "rubberband". Any Object or node within will be added to the selection if not already present. If you hold Shift+Crtl any object within the selection gets removed from the current selection. Someone with good knowledge of the Inkscape code should easily be able to implement this, since most of the needed code is already there.

Moderator edit -- This topic has been split. Please reply to appropriate topics now