I have just committed a set of major changes to the UI of the alignment tool, which make it work mostly like alignment tools found in vector graphics programs, and hopefully make it esier to use.

The way to use it now is to select layers by clicking on them or sweeping out a rubber-band rectangle that completely encloses the layer bounds. Hold down Shift to add the newly selected items to the set already selected. (Only Visable itmes are selected.) Then press a button in the Tool Options to bring all the selected items into alignment with each other. Selected layers are indicated by four small squares at the layer corners.

Please try it out and let me know if you find bugs -- I'm sure there are a few.

It occurred to me, as I was setting this up, that there is a logical similarity between selecting things for this tool, and linklng things using the Layers dialog -- and that there might be advantages in merging the two things, which wuold actually be quite easy. It would be simple to make the tool set items as "linked" when they are selected, and to have the alignment commands act on the set of items that are currently linked. This would have the advantage that after aligning items, you could easily move or transform them as a group, without having to mess around with the layers dialog. It would take a little infrastructure to make this all work smoothly, but nothing that would be difficult.

-- Bill

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