Inkscape: persistent alignment

Question

I know how to use alignment/distribution with inkscape.

But they only work once. It does not persist.

Example:

As soon as I change the size of one of the objects, and the alignment gets lost.

Is there a way to persist the alignment?

Example: If I change the size of the circle, its center should still be centered.

If Inkscape can't do that. Is there an other tool which can do this?

Answer 1

There is no such thing as persistent alignment in Inkscape AFAIK.

One thing you can do is resize objects around their center (holding shift while resizing).

Another option (my preferred) is to enable snapping to midpoints, centers of objects and centers of rotation, and to use guides. This way you can quickly snap objects back in place after modification.

Answer 2

Your question relates to the more general issue of transformation anchors, regardless of whether there are alignment requirements or not.

The currently available simple method, holding shift while resizing, always uses the center of the object as the anchor, which may or may not be what you want (in your example, you may want to keep centered alignment in the vertical direction, but left alignment for each object in the horizontal direction).

There is a proposal for selecting the transformation anchor. As per official documentation, The anchors let you decide the transformation center to use when entering a numerical value for a transformation (let it be from the toolbar or in the Object->Transform... dialog). The interface would let you select the center for the transformation. Then, you would have 3 (vertical) x 3 (horizontal) = 9 possible anchors. AFAIK, this is not available yet.

Answer 3

In order to change the size of any vectorial component and persist its transformation center you have three options:

1. holding shift + mouse drag (will perform symmetric transformation)
2. holding shift + ctrl (will scale but keeping the same aspect ratio)
3. holding shift + ctrl + alt (will scale upwards/downwards by twice/half the size && keeping the same ratio)