Simple scale to margins

[marcrleonard]

Hello, I'm having a hell of time accomplishing something (seemingly) simple. Whenever I create art, I do so with the paper dimensions in mind. So if I'm plotting to an 11x14, I will set my width/height to 356x276mm. The vast majority of the time when I am preparing the the SVG for plotting all I want to do scale the entire thing to provide a margin around the outside (say, 1cm). With vpype, I can't seem to accomplish this in a simple way. I've tried:
vpype read ./source.svg layout --fit-to-margins 1cm tight write --page-size 356x276mm ./output.svg (source.svg included in this post)

This does provide the margin, but it completely changes where the artwork is.

Unless I have a vast misunderstanding on how some of the commands work (which, I may), my overall impression is that there should be a a lot more inheritance of the original artwork so there is more of a 'do no harm' attitude. Things like moving/centering/write dimensions should all be a little less destructive. For instance, when calling write someart.svg it should write the output as the same dimensions as the source.

Anyways, just some thoughts! I think the tool is really great, as it provides all the buttons and switches you'd need. But for some reason, simple operations seem very hard to accomplish without a lot of commands.

[abey79]

Thanks for the feedback. From your description, I'm not 100% sure about the exact outcome you are looking for, in particular when it comes to the "out of bounds" part of your example SVG. Is that the expected output?

FWIW, this is how I obtained this result:

vpype read --no-crop input.svg layout -m 1cm --landscape 11x14in show

In any case, here are some relevant info on how vpype generally behaves:

• By default, read crops the geometries to the SVG boundaries. In your case, it means that 3/4th of your circle is cropped away. If that's not the intended behaviour, pass the -c/--no-crop option.
• The write command does honour the input SVG's bounds (or any bound set by other commands), unless you pass the --page-size argument, in which case those new bounds are used.
• The --page-size, --center, and --landscape options of the write command dates back from before layout existed and should generally not be used. I keep them around for backward compatibility reason, but they probably cause more harm than good.
• The layout command is the intended way to achieve what you seem to be wanting. It will do two things: (1) sets the page size to the provided argument and (2) scale/translate stuff to fit within the provided margin, with some control on vertical/horizontal alignment. As such, passing tight as argument to layout is typically not the intended behaviour.
• There are uses case that are not yet fully addressed by the layout command, e.g. see Allow for layout arg to maintain size of svg element #663.