u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish

We have to provide schematics in technical documentation. They come from TurboCAD originally.

Schematics have lots of labels. After importing them, we need to change the font and adjust the size of the text.

A larger schematic has about 2600 pieces of text. Selecting them at once should not be a problem for even a modest modern computer. But it's a huge problem in Inkscape.

I have all the text on a single layer. I've also tried putting it into a group. In neither case can I select the parent layer or group and then set the font and size. It just doesn't work. So you have to select the first text object, then scroll, scroll, scroll to the last and Shift-click it. And then go get some coffee... oh wait, no, you have to wait a bit and then click the title bar of the app window, or Inkscape will do nothing forever (on Windows 11). If you click the app-window title bar, it turns white with "not responding" and now you can go get coffee.

Eventually the text objects will be highlighted. Now you can change attributes of them, which works relatively quickly. But heaven forbid you click erroneously and upset your selection (for example, on that square next to the font drop-down, which is dedicated to selecting all text that has the font shown in the drop-down).

For comparison, Affinity performs the same action on the same file in well under a second.

As someone reminded me below, you can use the "select objects of same type" as a workaround for this case. But that won't work if you have layers with lots of items of mixed type. And it reveals a serious underlying problem, because selecting by type selects the same 2600 objects in a fraction of a second. Selecting directly takes minutes!

I don't have a beefy system, just an M1 Pro MBP with 32 GB RAM. I'm weighing the cost/benefit ratio of building a new system at the current insulting prices, but all I really want to do is use a local model for coding in Swift, JavaScript, and SQL.

It seems wasteful to have a model full of general knowledge for such a limited use-case. Is there such a thing as a highly-targeted model for coding in specific languages?

Hi all. I don't recall encountering this defect in Inkscape years ago; but now when you're typing text, the spacebar doesn't insert a space. You have to type your line of text and then go back and insert spaces between the words. This is a known bug that has apparently been around for years.

I consider this pretty crippling. Is everyone just tediously back-arrowing and fixing their text?