Scale shape to given area

I'd like to support the above mentioned idea and add some new features which would fit nicely into the ellipse tool.

I am using Win XP and Inkscape 0.46. Here is what I noticed:

1) The ellipse tool is lacking the possibility to define a radius for the created/edited ellipse (or rather x- and y-semiaxis values) directly within the tool-specific menu. You could even provide a locked ratio for easy drawing of circles (although this can already be done by holding the CTRL-key while dragging). In comparison, the rectangle tool is much more comfortable: you can define width, height and x- and y-radius for rounded corners.

2) When I look at an ellipse within the XML-Editor you can already see the radii in x- and y-direction (even if they are only given in px). This would help me more if these values would be adjusted when I scale the ellipse with the selector tool. Instead a transformation matrix is added which contains the scaling factor. This is quite unhandy! Again the solution within the rectangle tool is a good example of how it should work: scaling a rectangle with the selector tool results in adjusted values for width and height of the rectangle...

I have looked for a similar feature request, but found none. If this is already planned or even obsolete, I do apologize. Thanks for the great work you are all doing.

I totally agree. Especially point 1 Rincewind mentions would be a great improvement to usability. Since the rect tool has this kind of control, it only would make sense to add it to the circle/ellipse tool.

I would really LOVE to be able to do this. It would make it much easier to make info-graphics!

are you requesting the original proposal, which referred only to the area of an arbitrary object, or would you like to see the proposal by Rincewind, which is a request for new spin boxes to allow you to specify major and minor axes of an ellipse?