Why does Inkscape only snap sometimes when dragging objects?

Question

This is driving me crazy.

Sometimes when I drag an existing object, it will snap to the nearest crosspoint on the grid. Other times it will not. I keep thinking I've figured it out, but then I keep finding cases that don't work that way. At first I thought I had to grab the object near one of the vertices, but this doesn't seem to work for ellipses. Another time, I thought I needed to drag it less than a certain distance, but this doesn't seem to work for ellipses. Maybe ellipses just don't snap? I don't know.

No help via Google, unfortunately. Thanks!

Answer 1

See this documentation

In short, you have to choose what key-point to snap: corners, bounding box corners or midpoints, center (several flavours of that). For a rectangle shape, corners and bounding box corners are the same thing, but an ellipse doesn't have corners, so you need to select e.g. "center" or "bounding box midpoints" (which could be the most appropriate for snapping so that objects are tangent, if your ellipse has its main axes aligned with x,y axes). If you convert ellipse to path, then you can choose to snap the control points of the path.