I'm trying to use Inkscape 0.48 as a replacement for Corel Draw 10 for technical illustration. Very quickly, I noticed something from Corel that I can't find in Inkscape and hope that someone can point me in the right direction.

The feature I seek is the object browser functionality of the Corel Layers pallette. There, you can expand a layer to reveal the objects on that layer, select the objects and, more importantly for me, move them up and down so that they overlay objects below and are overlaid by objects above. As I tend to work in 'wireframe' (i.e. with no fills) initially and worry about rendering later, it's very difficult to see where each object is 'in the stack' without this functionality.

All help gratefully received,

Geoff

A browser of the z-order is not currently built into Inkscape. As a workaround, you can make a layer (Shift+Ctrl+N) for each object, to crudely simulate that feature.

Thanks. It's a pity that's missing, perhaps something to add to the application wish list!?

Much appreciated.

Some discussion here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/171995 (wishlist)

How about the xml editor (Shift+Ctrl+X)?
There objects are displayed in the correct z-order.
On the top there are the objects rendered first -thus they are displayed at the bottom.
You can select them each one by one on the left of that panel, and they will be immediately selected on the canvas.
Also you can drag and drop them on the left side of the panel, which makes no need to use the PgUp-PgDown buttons.

Another feature corel might not have is the search option (Ctrl+F).
Let's say you want to select all the objects with the same stroke width.
When you open the xml editor, you can copy that attribute from one path that has it, like stroke-width:10.62992095949999971,
then paste it into the search panel's right field, and it will select all of those at once.

tylerdurden wrote:Some discussion here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/171995 (wishlist)

Many thanks. The developers know that some would like to see this feature, so I've just added my Launchpad ID to those affected.

Lazur URH wrote:How about the xml editor (Shift+Ctrl+X)?
There objects are displayed in the correct z-order. ...

Thanks for the suggestion -- I'll give that a try.

Edited to add: I've given the XML Editor a try, and it works surprisingly well. FWIW, I've found it best to give meaningful object IDs as soon as possible. Thanks again.

Cheers, Geoff