I'm a new user to Inkscape as of yesterday after thinking about it for several years. I'm finding working with text on a path to be a frustrating experience. Especially the inability to drag text along a path. But that's beside the point of this post.

I want a simple oval with some curved text in it. I followed a tutorial and created a circle, put my text on it, rotated it to where I wanted it, stretched the circle to an oval shape, then set the stroke and fill on the oval to none to hide it. Things were going well. I saved my image, and it looked like this:


At some point I cloned my object to experiment with that feature, and suddenly my text jumped to a new location. Thinking "well, I guess I can't do that" I immediately reverted the file and.... Inkscape did not return the text to where it was. It now looks like this in Inkscape:


Viewing the svg file in my browsers seems to render it correctly, but Inkscape no longer will. Is this.... normal? Is there a "move my text around" setting I didn't realize I toggled that I can turn off somewhere? A workaround (recreating it doesn't count)? Or is this worth filing a bug for? If experimenting with tools leads to un-revertible changes to images, I don't think I'm going to stick with Inkscape. I'm linking the actual svg file here in case anyone is motivated to take a look at it.


Thanks,
Todd

Welcome Todd!

I'm actually not sure what Revert does. According to the manual, it removes all the changes in a current session. That seems a bit extreme, lol. I notice that all the layers are locked though, and I don't know if that would have prevented an reversion. Anyway, maybe consider Undo instead of Revert. Also, you can look at Edit menu > Undo, and it shows you the last thing that was done.

I'm not sure what might have happened to your text, but creating a Clone should not cause this problem. And either the revert DID work, or the cloning didn't work. Because there are no clones in the SVG. It looks like the path was somehow rotated, except that it's an oval, and the whole oval would have rotated. And I see that you used an Ellipse rather than a path. If you had used a path, and you broke the path, that might change where the text begins. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

In fact, I have no idea what could have caused that. But you're right. It shows with text at top and bottom, on the the image in your message. But when I save and open it, the text is all bunched over on the right side!

Well, this is certainly a mystery to me! Maybe someone else can sort it out?

PS - I wouldn't give up on Inkscape because of this. This is some sort of anomaly that I haven't seen before.

Meant to mention in my original post I'm using Inkscape 0.48.2 on a Mac with OS 10.8.2 in case that's relevant.

Just had this same thing happen. Googled for a couple minutes and found this...

Go to the beginning of the text with your cursor and Alt-Arrow the text around the path as you like.

Would be good if Inkscape got the feature to undo to required edit operation, listed in a scroll of the edits.

brynn wrote: What I wish is that you could undo one action, that was done several steps back, without undoing the steps inbetween. That would be super awesome!

...Sort of like stacking several blocks into a tower and then deciding you want to remove the bottom one but don't want the other blocks to move from where they are!

That's unlinkely to be implemented in most software as the between steps introduce or remove material or move things, so it would be very difficult what a middle step entails to undo or the object might not be there. When you do the actions in strictly sequential order then you're guaranteed to be able to undo things rightly.

Well yes, undoing the 3rd step back, without undoing the 1st and 2nd, would not always be do-able. But if there's a step that's not dependant upon or depends upon the ones in between, it would be awesome.