improvement: UI for path operations

[Ulrich-windl]

In Inkscape 0.48.5 r10040 on x86_64 openSUSE 13.2 (and earlier versions) I have found this user problem with path operations:
If you selected objects like text converted to a path (object to path), and you try to aply combining path operations (like xor), nothing acually ssems to happen. As I found out this only works if the text object is selected with tha path tool (and not with the selection tool).
So I wonder whether this behavior should be changed to either "gray out" path operations if it wouldn't work anyway, or to allow selection of converted text objects using the plain selection tool ("arrow").
Related is this: If you selected objects, apply a path operation, the decide to undo, then my expactation is that the selection is still active, but actually nothing is selected after undo.

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

Path operations don't work with groups, and when converted to path, texts are converted to groups of paths. Thus you need to ungroup the text before applying the operation.

[Ulrich-windl (ulrich-windl)]

Maybe a better indication of which elements are actually groups would be helpful as a very first step.
Having a warning if (and why) an operation is not applicable would be another helpful step to teach the user what's going on.