Forums | NoesisGUI

I am struggling to find a suitable XAML editor. I am designing aircraft instrumentation so freehand draw tools are unsuitable. Any support for constraint based parametric design would be ideal, but it should at least have robust aligning and snapping tools.

InkScape has descent snapping tools but the XAML export doesn't support rotation centers and the exported coordinates and sizes are not the same as in the editor. For example, a width of 1024 is exported as 1023.171, even in SVG. That renders it useless right of the bat.

Blend doesn't even support snapping of shape nodes to guide lines and other shapes so that makes it very difficult to make accurate shapes.

Any other tools out there?

I had a play with Illustrator but you can't name shapes and groups and rotation centers can't be permanently changed.

Another option would be editing the XAML files by hand but that is really tedious. It's like programming in assembly.

Any other options?

I'm just playing with the snap option in Blend, and it is in fact working with shapes. They are correctly snapped to the grid.

You can adjust the snap grid Tools > Options > Artboard. By default gridline spacing is set to 5 pixels.

Snapping to grid is only suitable if you create a new design of something. But if you are replicating an existing design, you need a bit more flexibility. You need to be able to place the grid lines anywhere you want, not just at a fixed interval. Normally "guide lines" will provide this functionality but in Blend, snapping to guide lines only works for shapes and a path bounding box. But the actual path nodes don't snap to guide lines and this is a severe limitation for reverse engineering existing designs.

This is what I am trying to make. It is an A320 Display Unity (PFD):
You can certainly make that by snapping to grid, but if you want to make that accurately instead of "close enough", and not spend a week on one shape, you need more CAD-like tools. Node snapping to guide lines is an absolute minimum. InkScape supports that but the output coordinates are run through some alien warp flux machine as they don't make sense whatsoever.

Still looking for something suitable. Will report back if I find something interesting.

Edit: I partially solved the weird InkScape coordinates. That was caused by the object stroke. All I need now is to make an exporter which removes all the transforms and adds rotation centers and then we are in business.

I understand, if you need to snap shape vertices Blend is not appropriate

We will be glad to hear your progress on the InkScape xaml exporter.

Using Inkscape with ViewerSVG (svg to xaml converter) now works perfectly fine

Finally some proper svg support. It would be awesome though if you can add build in support for svg.

Nice to hear! Do you have nice screenshots to share with us? I would love to see them!

PS: We didn't forget about your bug-tracker issues. It is only that there were lot of critical problems in v1.2 we needed to solve.

Here are some screenshots