On Fri, 11 May 2001, James Henstridge wrote:
> On 10 May 2001, Lars Clausen wrote:
>
>>
>> Here's a problem with groups I just noticed: Grouping objects destroys
>> their depths. When you create a group, it becomes a new object on top
>> of the other objects, and the depth of the objects is ignored. Try
>> this:
>>
>> Create three partially overlapping rectangles. Select the two lowest.
>> Group them. They jump to the front.
>>
>> The objects in the group retain their relative depth, which is good.
>> But the group object should not really have a depth of its own, rather
>> the individual objects should be at their original depths. (And the
>> Group/Ungroup operations should be idempotent inverses.) That, however,
>> is tricky to do with the current implicit ordering.
>>
>> Is this something we should work on? Have anyone been bothered by this?
>> I only noticed now that I look at groups for XFig.
>
> I always considered groups as being a single object. It sounds a bit
> weird for another object to be `in between' a group. Maybe creating a
> group shouldn't cause the objects to raise to the top of the stack, but
> grouped objects have always acted as one position in the depth stack in
> all the drawing software I have used.
It depends on what a group is. It makes sense to say a group is a bunch of
objects you manipulate together, in which case grouping shouldn't change
their depth. But I know how hard it would be to change that in Dia, and I
got a reasonable fix for XFig import (it puts it at the highest depth
involved), so I don't think we should worry.
-Lars
--
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause) | Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I | Retainer of Sir Kegg
will defend to the death your right to say it." | of Westfield
--Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire | Chaos Berserker of Khorne
