Comment 1 for bug 452102

> Personally I think Inkscape should measure the positions and widths
> *without* the stroke width
already implemented in 0.47pre: set the bounding box to 'geometric' in the 'Tools' preferences. The select tool controls bar shows the height and width of the bounding box of the selected object(s), not the length of a path segment.

Note: geometric bbox is currently limited in its usefulness for numeric entry of X/Y and H/W due to bug #190557. See also related bug #212768 “Geometric and Visual bounding box and object dimensions”.