Flowed Text difficult to work with after transformation

[John M. Adams]

Unexpected behavior found in both of these versions:

Inkscape 0.48.5 r10040 on Windows 7 Professional SP1 (64 bit)
Inkscape 0.48.4 r9939 on Windows 7 Professional SP1 (32 bit)

My co-worker had difficulty changing letter spacing in a file she was working on. I have isolated and reproduced the issue.

Steps:

Create and populate a text object.
Create a rectangle.
Use "Flow into Frame"... text object is converted to FlowRoot linked to rectangle.
Drag to transform FlowRoot.

At this point, if you select the text, setting letter spacing and word spacing using the text tool's toolbar becomes very buggy.

For instance, click in "Letter Spacing", type 20.0, then "tab". When tabbing focus away, letter spacing changes to "5.11".
From "5.11", click the "up" arrow, it changes to "1.31" (wrong increment, wrong direction).
From "1.31", click the "up" arrow again, it changes to "0.34".
Type -20.0, then "tab". When tabbing focus away, letter spacing changes to "-5.11".
Type 100.0, then "tab". When tabbing focus away, letter spacing changes to "25.56".

The letter spacing value seems to move towards either 0 or 100. In the file provided, it wants to trend towards 0. In the original business document, it was trending towards 100.

Setting letter spacing on FlowRoot in the XML editor works as expected.

Setting Transform to empty on the FlowRoot allows manipulation of letter and word spacing on the text tool's toolbar to function normally again.

Attached is a sample file created in Inkscape from a new default document. It contains a normal text object, a rectangle, and a bugged FlowRoot linked to the rectangle.

I'd be happy to provide anything else, if it would be helpful.
Thank you.

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

- reproduced on Windows 7, Inkscape 0.91 r13725 (Jan 30 2015)
- reproduced on Inscape trunk rev 13919.

the problem does not appear to be related to document units. However it may be related to the transform that the text has. If I type in 100 for the spacing, and then click away to lose focus, the 100 converts to 32.01. The text has a transform with x scale = 2.0852 and y scale = 4.68168. The geometric mean of these is 3.12446, and the reciprocal of this is 0.32005, which agrees well with the above observed scaling. Further tests using scaling factors of, say, (4, 4), or (2, 0.5), confirm that the spin box scaling is related to the geometric mean of the transform.

likely a special case of Bug 772057

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

fix committed to rev 13937, please re-test

[su_v (suv-lp)]

[ Needs retesting with current trunk build ]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Inkscape because there has been no activity for 60 days.]