On 16/03/15 08:09, Joseph Bupe wrote:

Managing layers manually between layer-to-image-size and crop-to-content in order to be able to work with certain tools or filters is, in my opinion, too devious. E.g If I want to use Aligment tool - I have to crop-to-content to remove empty borders, which also works better with transform tools; If I want to add a drop-shadow - I have to convert layer-to-image-size.

Is the proposed automatic layer boundary management going to take care of this situation? If not, maybe layers should be in a crop-to-content mode by default and allow the content's bounds expand automatically only when adding effects like drop shadow. At least this is how it's done in Inkscape.

As far as I can tell Filters>Light and shadow>Drop shadow works on a layer which isn't as big as the image (canonical case: freshly created Text layer). The problem isn't the layer itself but, if you do the drop shadow manually, the boundaries of the layer that receives the shadow. But if it needs to be bigger than the shadowed layer, it doesn't need to be the size of the canvas.

Removing empty borders doesn't always work. Imagine that you have two text layers with the same font, one with "fill" and one with "ping". If you remove all empty borders you cannot align them properly above or under a horizontal guide because you'll have auto-cropped different sides...

So, what would be needed would be some kind of automatic enlargement to fit altered pixels...

About alignment: I agree that sometime it doesn't make much sense to align the layer borders. For instance, being able to align the baseline of text on a guide would be great. Currently when moving layers you can snap the sides or the center; it could be nice to have in addition a top/bottom/left/right inner snap reference (which by default would correspond to the auto-cropped content, or, for text layers, to the baseline).