ability to turn off floating point coordinates and sizes

[mairin]

I would love to have the ability to turn off floating point x, y coordinates and height & width for artwork. A lot of the work I do is meant for on-screen. While I understand the value of having the ability to place objects at floating point coordinates and have floating point sizes for print work, for pixel work this results in objects not being aligned to the pixel grid which makes the resulting work fuzzy.

Grid snapping is not a sufficient solution because:

- it is not fine-grained. I want to be able to move an object only to integer x,y coordinates. The grid snapping, despite many adjustments, is way too coarse-grained to serve as a useful workaround. The only point at which it helps the situation is if you're zoomed way in on an image.

- when you import objects such as bitmaps, they very often are imported with seemingly random coordinates like x, y 100.5, 0.80. grid snapping cannot help with this. These floating point coordinates make imported bitmaps them blurry right off the bat. beginning users have no idea why they are blurry and how to fix it. and it's an annoyance to have to go through each imported object to adjust the coordinates to be integer.

- when you create objects inside of inkscape like a square or a star, they do not always stick to integer sizes, and having grid snapping enabled won't help with this.

sometimes inkscape fights me when i try to make an object have both integer height & width and x,y coordinates. e.g., if an object is 21.4 pixels wide, and i erase the .4 and hit enter to make it 21, inkscape will update the width to be maybe 21.3333. so then i have to erase the .3333, and it'll give me 21.27645453. i erase the numbers beyond the decimal again, and i might get 20.99999999. and i'll have to erase the .999999 several times before i finally get a 21.0. this fun game starts again when i try to adjust the x,y coordinates to integers. sometimes fixing these results in the height and width getting thrown off again which results in a bonus round of inkscape pixel fighting. :(

thanks for your consideration.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Possibly related bug reports with recent activity:
  bug #210145 “Rounding errors”
  bug #168002 “Stroke width rounding errors”

Looking for workarounds I tried to reduce the numeric precision in the preferences which resulted in
  bug #399604 “'malloc: *** error' after changing numeric precision to 1 or 2 ”:

[Pablo Trabajos (pajarico)]

> - it is not fine-grained. I want to be able to move an object only to integer x,y coordinates. The grid snapping, despite many adjustments, is way too coarse-grained to serve as a useful workaround. The only point at which it helps the situation is if you're zoomed way in on an image.

Could you please attach a file of what are you doing? If you set the grid X and spacing to 1px it should work as expected.

> - when you create objects inside of inkscape like a square or a star, they do not always stick to integer sizes, and having grid snapping enabled won't help with this.
This is no longer true. Scale objects using the selector tool and leaving "affect stroke width" disabled. It will snap to the grid perfectly. The latest release 0.47pre2 [1] includes a snapping toolbar. Select snap to bounding box and disable snap to nodes or handles.
Please, test it and report back.

[1]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape/files/

[Francesco Montorsi (francesco-montorsi)]

I would like to second this request. I've been using Inkscape for a while to draw geometric quotes and when you try to draw lines, shapes and everything else perfectly aligned is practically very difficult, regardless of the grid and snapping mode.

Indeed a grid with spacing 1px and snapping helps a lot, but is sometimes not sufficient and is very very easy to loose the "perfect alignment" when scaling, moving, etc. If only there was a tool "round all coordinates to the nearest integer" it would simplify my life A LOT :)

Just my 2 cents... thanks.

[rbastide (raphael-bastide)]

I like this idea as well. Currently I use my text editor to round values.