[Ipe-discuss] ipe features

[Otfried Cheong]

Dmitriy Morozov wrote:
> On a somewhat related topic. What exactly is the depth model in Ipe? I
> find "Move to Back"/"Move to Front" to be way too coarse of a manipulation
> scheme. I personally would prefer something like XFig's explicit depth
> setting. Would this be difficult to implement in Ipe? Does it require a
> major rewrite, or does it fit in with the current model?

Ipe doesn't use explicit depth values, but simply keeps all objects on 
the page in an ordered list -- the front object is the last one on the list.

What we could have is a function "Move back/forward one step", which 
exchanges two adjacent positions on the list.

The object menu could also display the rank of the object, and you could 
  set this to a different value to move it up or down at will.

Perhaps one could then have a mode that displays the ranks of all 
objects at the same time (although computing a good label position will 
be a challenging algorithmic problem).

Otfried