On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 16:05 -0400, John Culleton wrote:

Been playing with the DTP program scribus and its tutorials a bit. One feature in that program is the ability to place an object exactly on the layer by specifying starting location and dimensions numerically. A rule can also be placed exactly by specifying its X or Y coordinate. This is handy for things like book covers where placements have to be exact or the image is useless. Drag and drop is not adequate.

I have, in fact, been wanting something like this too. And a very similar functionality is aligning a layer on the image. I have made a little mockup of two dialogs.

http://jimmac.musichall.cz/stuff/gimp/align-layer.png http://jimmac.musichall.cz/stuff/gimp/position-layer.png

They both require a custom control, which may be expensive in terms of developer time, but definitely a lot more usable than what "align visible layers" uses currently for example. It is really hard to use and hardly intuitive. The control defines what part of the current layer (boundary) is to be aligned.

Combining these two into a single dialog seems to be a better solution though:

http://jimmac.musichall.cz/stuff/gimp/position-layer2.png

Open Questions and Issues:

* The spinboxes and the unit combobox aren't accessible with a mnemonic.
* In some cases multiple source nodes give same results. I still find the interface more intuitive though. * I am not sure if the dialog should remember it's previous settings or fill in the current position (and recalculate when selecting different nodes?).

I have filed this as an enhancement request #143163.

cheers