Comment 23 for bug 170049

Dusan,

If you think it's so easy to fix, know that we are more than happy to accept a patch from you. ;) Developers have commented on it and agree that it needs to be fixed. It's just not as easy to fix as you would like. If this was as straightforward as you wish it were, it would have been fixed long ago.

Would you like it if you upgraded Inkscape and all of your old documents were flipped upside down, objects misplaced, things that were transformed (scaled/rotated) to be even more oddly handled, etc? Those are just some of the possibilities of what is expected to go wrong. For this to be handled properly, it needs to be ensured that we retain full and painless backwards compatibility. That is the primary reason it hasn't been touched. For the record we inherited this issue from sodipodi when it was forked, so the issue is actually older than 6 years...

Honestly though, the proper fix for this is to default to top-left oriented coordinates, but to have the coordinate system completely customizable by the user so they can define their preference per-document for where 0,0 is located. It's much better to fix this the right way than to have to make multiple passes on the code.