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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

Are there ways to make inkscape work more... symbolically/logically?

I tried making an SVG manually, using real basic integer coordinates.

Then I wondered if inkscape could do better, and imported it.

It took my nice shapes, like a rectangle from 0,0 to 50,100 and mangled all the coordinates into floating point numbers like 0.0123,0.00456 49.9998,100.00123 (not exactly, but you get the idea)

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I work in inkscape a lot, and aesthetically like to keep things aligned on integers where possible. Makes it easier to edit by hand if needed, keeps things aligned, and keeps files small.

You have to be careful about when you move, scale, group, ungroup, etc. But I have found it pretty reasonable to stay on nice round numbers with inkscape. I feel like inkspace is BETTER for that than say illustrator.

Worst case you can export as "Optimized SVG" and reduce the number of decimals. Make sure you check it after though since it can change the design when rounding.

Inkscape includes the border width in the displayed object size and position. So an SVG file with a 100 units square and a 1 unit border will be a 101 units square in Inkscape. And if you change the stroke width the object size changes. This causes the coordinate mangling you saw.

Consequently, I find it impossible to do precise CAD style diagrams in Inkscape. Of course, it's not designed for that.

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