On 07/07/16 03:17 PM, Sven Arvidsson wrote:
I have a very simple file with two text objects, two circles and an image and that's exactly what happened when I tried to work with it. The circles (no stroke and no fill) were used to create a path for the text to follow.On Thu, 2016-07-07 at 14:23 -0400, Gary Dale wrote:I admit that I only use Inkscape on an occasional basis but I don't recall it being so atrociously bad in my past experiences with it. However the current round of bugs I'm seeing suggest that the developers aren't really in control of their code. Grouping objects creates different results in transformations than telling Inkscape to treat the selection as a group. Ungrouping objects causes them to shift position or rotation. And putting text on a path produces bizarre results. If the path isn't a circle, you may not be able to produce the effect you want. As far as I can remember, these things all used to work. Does anyone know what's going on with Inkscape development to make it so unusable right now?I work a lot in Inkscape and have not experienced anything you describe here.
It took two circles because Inkscape's arcane (more likely buggy) method of putting a text on path works very badly. It takes hair-pulling sequences of flips and rotations to get the text to where it should be. You can't do it with just one circle because the circle, once set for the first piece of text, can't be touched for the second - you need a second, identical, circle to be able to do the flips and rotations to get the second piece of text right.
When I resized the document, after scaling the drawing, so that the drawing would fit on a single page, I couldn't re-centre it by selecting the entire drawing and treating it as a group. I had to actually group the drawing. When I tried to ungroup it, the text moved around. Since the purpose of the ungroup was to replace the image with a different one, repositioning the text was not an option since it would be difficult to get it back to exactly the same position.
This meant that I couldn't simply replace the image with another one. I had to cover it with a circle the same colour as the background (white) to "erase" it.
Anyway, if you look at http://www.lionsclub.ca/images/vest%20design%20-%20curved%20text%201.png you will see the drawing when the objects are grouped. http://www.lionsclub.ca/images/vest%20design%20-%20curved%20text-%20bad%20.png is the way the drawing looks after an ungroup. Note that both pieces of text are moved left and upwards and the "West Hill" text is rotated about 15 degrees counter-clockwise.