Comment 6 for bug 697860

Revision history for this message
su_v (suv-lp) wrote :

> How did you you go about finding that group? I suppose the
> xml source as I haven't seen any indication in the UI.

When investigating a reported problem I often rely on the XML Editor to inspect the file structure (or I take a look the SVG source in a plain-text editor). But in this case, you can discover it using the normal GUI too: when opening your attached file in Inkscape, the layer indicator in the status bar tells me that anything I draw will be inside the currently entered group (this status is saved across sessions, like normally the current layer). Since the report is about path effects, I opened the Path Effect Editor and changed the current drawing level back to the parent layer - leaving any (possibly nested) group(s), using the keyboard shortcut 'Ctrl+>Backspace'. The keyboard shortcut has the convenient side-effect of keeping the just-left group as current selection. At this point any path effect that might have been applied to the group itself gets listed in the Path Effect Editor.

The GUI for LPEs doesn't differ or specially indicate when handling LPEs on groups - which can be confusing, especially if it was either
- not intentional, or
- causing some unexpected effects (like recursively applying a path effect on nested groups), or
- loosing the selection when node-editing a parameter path of the group on-canvas, or
- …

With this in mind I had some ideas what I was looking for when I opened your drawing - which might explain why the combination of 'Shift+Ctrl+&' [1], <esc> [2], 'Ctrl+<Backspace>' seems obvious to me in hind-sight ;)

> Feel free to close it as NOTABUG though.

Would it be OK to turn it into a question? This would change the bug status to 'Invalid' and move the issue (and further discussion) to Inkscape's 'Answers' section of Launchpad: <https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape>.

Alternatively this report could be turned into a feature request asking for a better indicator in the GUI if a group has a path effect applied (I don't have an idea though how that could look like).

[1] might differ depending on your keyboard layout - with 'de_CH' it is 'Shift+Ctrl+6' , with en_US it would be 'Shift+Ctrl+7'.
[2] <esc> to focus from the dialog back to the canvas (workaround for bug #201203, #505225)