2

I'm trying to create a triangular grid in Inkscape. I'm going to create a slanted line then clone it along a direction to obtain a fence, then clone the fence at 60 and 120 degrees to obtain a grid at, for example, 5-mm steps.

The problem is that creating a clone is specified by shifts expressed in percentages of the original object's dimensions. Since the original line is slanted, it's dimensions are expressed in ugly fractions of mm. So, to specify a shift in percent that would correspond to a 5-mm step, I have to calculate even uglier fraction. A small inaccuracy of the percentage can lead to the cumulative shift error, which may result in distant clones not being on the regular 5-mm grid.

How can I specify the shift of the clones using millimeters, not percent?

mbaitoff
  • 8,831
  • 4
  • 24
  • 32

1 Answers1

1

It seems that this question has an answer typical to free software: this issue has been highlighted in 2005, and hasn't been fixed (or, actually, implemented) for almost six years - see the bugtracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/170835

Alexander
  • 23,432
  • 11
  • 63
  • 73
mbaitoff
  • 8,831
  • 4
  • 24
  • 32
  • Migrated to "feature request" https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/-/issues/2613 2 years ago. – handle Oct 13 '22 at 08:09
  • Every fifteen years something happens to this basic functionality request, jeez. – mbaitoff Oct 15 '22 at 06:49
  • I think they are accepting pull requests (code contributions), so anyone could help make it happen. I was looking into it because it was not clear to me that for a simple translate the shift percentage 0% implicitly uses 100% of the original object size (placing the clones next to each other by default). – handle Oct 15 '22 at 08:15