hold font size constant when resizing group

Bug #170714 reported by Richk449
96
This bug affects 16 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Inkscape
Invalid
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

I would be incredibly useful if there were two switches
that were similar to the "stroke width" and "rounded
corner" scaling buttons:

1) when scaling objects, scale the text by the same
proportion - if this were not selected, then the font
size would stay fixed as the object was scaled. It
doesn't have to work very well - if the text placement
gets off, that is okay with me.

2) when scaling objects, keep text aspect ratio fixed -
if this were enabled, fonts would not become
"distorted" when objects are resized. They would
change size, but still look good.

Both of these would be incredibly useful for me, since
I use inkscape to make technical slides. I never want
the aspect ratio of my fonts to change. Often I want
to resize a group of objects slightly, but don't want
to change the font size.

Revision history for this message
Buliabyak-users (buliabyak-users) wrote :

For 1, what do you want the text to do instead? Just stay
the same? Why can't you then select all but the text?

I have in my plans a scale/nonscale switch for text, but I
wanted to make it change letterspacing and linespacing in
the non-scale mode, which I think will be more useful than
just leaving text untouched.

For 2, why can't you scale it with Ctrl, or click the lock
icon on the selector toolbar?

Revision history for this message
Richk449 (richk449) wrote :

The reason that I made the request is that I often have
semi-technical drawings that I like to reuse. The drawing
will be composed of lines, boxes, and text, all grouped
together. I often want to resize it (sometimes preserving
aspect, sometimes not). I have attached a simple example of
this.

Both of my issues stem from the fact that I often want text
preserved, while I want the lines and boxes to scale, but
all are in a group together.

So, for 1, I may have a page with all the text in font size
24, but I want to make the drawing bigger. It would be nice
to be able to just scale the grouped drawing, enlarging it,
while the text stays at 24 point.

For 2, I never want to change the aspect ratio on text. I
am not sure I can justify this, but for my purposes, text is
text, and it should never change aspect ratio. So when I
change the aspect ratio on a drawing, I would like the text
to keep it's "proper" aspect ratio, with perhaps some
semi-intelligent scaling of the font.

As you point out, there are currently ways to achieve what I
want. I just thought that those two switches would make the
tasks I commonly do much easier.

Revision history for this message
Bug Importer (bug-importer) wrote :

Take a look at how Openoffice Draw has two different types
of text (and I'm fairly sure other programs make a similar
split).

When text is a path you can treat it like any other object
and resize it - ideally Inkscape would have some magic in
the background to allow you to continue to edit pathtext
beyond the normal limitations imposed by SVG

Then the rest of the time text should probably be treated as
textbox, and the box would be resized and the text would not
change except to reflow.

Changed in inkscape:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: New → Confirmed
su_v (suv-lp)
tags: added: text transformations
Revision history for this message
ottadini (ben-harrison) wrote :

Nice to see that this is on the wishlist. 5 years is a long time.

I also have technical drawings (x-y plots) that need to be scaled to suit, where I want the text position (anchor point?) to be moved with the rest of the drawing, but the text shape and size to remain as it is.

For simplicity, and in the hope that it can be done quickly, the first thing to manage is a simple switch for text while transforming: "move and scale text with transform" / "move but don't scale text with transform".

Inkscape shouldn't really worry about 'intelligent scaling' of text (example given above involving linespacing, kerning, etc) in my opinion.

Revision history for this message
Geoff McDonald (glmcdona) wrote :

I can't wait for this feature to be added. When I am resizing plot figures with axis labels, it currently screws the fonts up so bad if I want to do something like increase the width of the figure.

Revision history for this message
texnic (kotya-karapetyan) wrote :

I'd like to vote for this feature as well. I fully agree with what ottadini and Geoff McDonald are saying.

Revision history for this message
Domus (dominique-domussoft) wrote :

Has this feature been planned for any upcoming version? It's the one big thing I miss in Inkscape.

jazzynico (jazzynico)
Changed in inkscape:
status: Confirmed → Triaged
tags: added: preferences
Revision history for this message
Chris Hodges (c-j-hodges) wrote :

This is something I'm looking for as well. Beacuse I have a limited range of font sizes but a lot of small text objects I often end up doing a find/replace in a text editor after major scaling to restore them.

Revision history for this message
spaceLem (spacelem) wrote :

This is something I would find very useful too (it's a typical problem when rescaling graphs).

Revision history for this message
Alain Brenzikofer (mogelchischte) wrote :

I strongly support this feature request. I'd like to use inkscape for technacal drawings as well as for block diagrams. For this, I need an option to mark text as immutable to scaling

Revision history for this message
Geoff (gphillips) wrote :

I often have groups that contains a lot of text objects (e.g. geometrical diagrams with dimensions labelled with text) that I wish to remain at constant size when the rest of the group is resized. Selecting the non-text bits would take a lot of time compared to having the option to ignore text when resizing.

Revision history for this message
username132 (sean-van-der-smythe) wrote :

I would also like to be able to scale objects without affecting the font size, only affecting the position of the text.

Revision history for this message
Ilja (iljamal) wrote :

I'm looking forward to a button which locks the font size (why not also linewidth) during rescaleing objects.
I use Inkscape as postprocessing images from Matlab, Python, R for print images in journals, where
I often end up resizing plots and creating new axis labels and legends to meet the journals requirements.
Such feature would make the Inkscpae even more awesome tool!

Revision history for this message
grey tomorrow (gtomorrow) wrote :

Hi - thanks for reporting this bug, I've manually migrated it to Inkscape's new bug tracker on GitLab, and closed it here.

Please feel free to file new bugs about the issues you're seeing at
https://inkscape.org/report .

Moved to: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/3651
Closed by: https://gitlab.com/greytomorrow

tags: added: bug-migration
Changed in inkscape:
status: Triaged → Invalid
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