Hello,

First, let me congratulate you on this excellent free tool you have developped. I have found it to be easy to use but offer all the functionality I can wish for.

While I have easily found how to align *nodes*, I cannot find a way to align node *handles*. A web search made me discover a bug report flagged "solved" that made me believe the operation was possible, but I still haven't found out how.

To be as clear as possible, I am trying to make a water drop shape starting from a circle. So I converted a circle to path, dragged the top node upwards, made it a cusp node (corner node), and then dragged the two handles back down. I now have a mostly drop-y shape. Only problem is, it is not symmetrical. I would like to be able to horizontally align the two node handles to make my drop shape symmetrical.

Thank you,
Minganie

Probably it would be useful to have Symmetry available for aligning nodes and handles, but either way you`ll need to define axis of that symmetry before further changes... so, you may try with the triangle pointed upwards, enable snapping , move it`s top corner to the top of the drop and then use the corners at the bottom as a guidance for handles.



Have you considered using Grid? ... creating just a half of the drop at the beginning, then duplicate and join? ...

You can also use a guide. Go to the top ruler bar, click and drag down. A guide will appear. Position it where you want. The handles will snap to the guide when they're close.

All excellent suggestions, and I'll add another. If I'm drawing a symmetrical object, I always use a grid. Node handles can be snapped to grid lines and intersections.

To expand a bit on Maestral's suggestion, you could select the new triangle, and do Object menu > Object to Guide. This would be more useful if you need to make more than one drop. So you could move the triangle guide to each new drop. Although I guess you could drag the triangle itself, just as easily. Well anyway, just a thought

Thank you all so much for your suggestions. I'm new to Inkscape, so everything you suggested is like a revelation! Despite reading the manual twice, I'd never figured out snapping before I had a working example to work with.

The snap and grid options work very well, but still, I'm not certain I understand - is there really no dedicated tool/option to align handles rather than nodes themselves? No way to constrain Inkscape to make symmetrical shapes (i.e. not only the node handles should be aligned on the same horizontal line, they should be at the same distance on each side of the node)?

I will so use the snapping and grid from now on!
Thanks again!

Hi Minganie,
I think way back around or before version 0.44 there was some sort of symmetry feature (mirrored side to side). But it was dropped, for some reason. I never saw it, but heard about it once. One of the first features I asked about, when I first started to learn Inkscape, was if node handles could be sculpted like nodes (node sculpting Alt + drag one node of a multiple selection of nodes). I was imagining some abstract images using Spiral tool, sort of like a swirly texture.

I'm not sure if either of these have ever been formally requested. You could check at Launchpad https://launchpad.net/inkscape, and if there are no such requests, you could make them. If you do find any, you can add your support.

All right, thanks for the answer. However, I think grid and snapping are enough for my inexperienced uses. Thank you all for your suggestions.