I've been using Inkscape for about a year now and I use it primarily for technical scale drawings of buildings and other items that I'm building around my homestead. I used to use a very old version of Adobe Illustrator which no longer works with my current (or any other current) OS.

One problem that I continue to fight with is the way a rectangle's (and other shapes) width is calculated when the object has a stroke applied to it. Illustrator's measurements and dialogs that allow one to type in a precise width affect an object's bounding box, and it's value is unaffected by the presence or absence of a stroke. Even with geometric bounding boxes selected in preferences the dialogs at the top of the screen show the width of the object including it's stroke width.

If I use a standard stroke I can manage to adjust my scales to deal with this behavior... but then I'm totally screwed when I change the value of the stroke's width. Ideally I need to be able to open up a drawing, select a shape, and see it's width expressed as a number that I can quickly convert to it's real world value. This is really handy for cabinet design and building.

I have two questions that I just can't seem to find an answer to:

1). Is it possible to somehow adjust Inkscape's preferences so that it behaves more like Illustrator in respect to bounding boxes and their recognized widths not being affected by the width of a stroke?

2). If not, is it possible to have a shape with a stroke that is "inset" instead of "center-set" against the bounding box?

Either of those solutions would work for my needs and make Inkscape about 1000 times more useful to me than it already is. Other than this one issue / behavior I've found the transition from Illustrator to Inkscape quite pleasant and straight forward. Thanks for all the hard work that went into making this fantastic illustration software. I love being able to freely share my source files with others... and before Inkscape that wasn't possible most of the time.

Thank you for any advice or solutions you can offer me on how I might solve my "problem".

Kind regards,

Patrick Harris

There's a number of requests on that topic, try reading
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/190557
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/212768
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/370137
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/398715
there are probably duplicates but it's hard to figure them out

stroke width offset https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/398715

as you can see the devs are aware of it