Option to disable certain features

[David Mathog]

Wishlist

There are some features supported by Inkscape which are not supported on the ultimate target (here, PowerPoint or postscript), and these cause problems if they are enabled. These include:

1. Opacity other than 100%
2. Gradients (special case of preceding)
3. Filters of any kind.
4. Stretched text (no scaled, as in a different font size, but different scale factors for Horizontal and Vertical.)

There are probably others.

The problem is that these features are often accidentally applied, and in a complex drawing it can be a pain to find them. What happens in practice is that on moving the drawing to the target program/output one finds either that the whole thing is locked and cannot be broken down into objects, or it has been bitmapped. It would be really helpful if there was a generalized:

 enable features

menu somewhere, such that one could disable these functions in inkscape, preventing their accidental application. The relevant keyboard shortcuts would be ignored, and the controls in dialogs would be grayed out or perhaps marked with a "lock" symbol.

A closely related issue is the representation of dotted/dashed lines. Inkscape provides fine control over this but many other programs just have generic: solid, dotted, dashed, and dot-dashed. There is currently no way to tell Inkscape to restrict itself to the simpler case. For generating EMF files, for instance, Inkscape uses the more general of two supported dotted/dashed line records, but PowerPoint cannot read those. The work around is to break all dotted/dashed lines up before EMF export. In most instances it would be far more convenient to tell inkscape to use the simplified set, which the EMF export could see too, and so use the simplified EMF line representation, which PowerPoint could read.

[David Mathog (mathog)]

5. fill patterns