Simplify path does not work properly
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Inkscape |
Confirmed
|
Medium
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Try this: it's fun if it happens to work for you!
1. open a new fresh document,
2. draw a circle with the circle tool (ctrl-draw at ~45°);
3. press and keep hold ctrl-L (simplify path);
4. watch the movie!
If you don't get any funny movie, it means you have been unluky: try again :)
Or you can try the attachment: select any of the shapes and super-ctrl-L here and there.
Jokes apart, I don't always get the same result: it depends on what I've done before and on something else I can't figure out. Sometimes after the first single ctrl-L you get a slightly deformed circle, some others you get a drop (one node becomes a <90° cusp). I really can't reproduce this: I've tried saving one document to see if it's document related but I don't think so as I always start from the same template but don't always get this effect. Also sometimes it wasn't happening, then it happens and after it stops; all in the same session. Maybe it be zoom related?
About circles: if you draw a circle and press ctrl-L, you get 5 non equi-spaced cusp nodes with handlers almost aligned (they may be not for more complex starting paths); then if you press ctrl-L again you get 4 out of 5 nodes slightly moving. Sometimes (as I was describing at the beginning) they do not move _slightly_ but so much that the circle is heavily deformed until it becomes a drop, smaller at the beginning and finally exploding to a huge one.
Taking apart the final special-effect, i find that the shape becomes much more complex after the simplification! Compare it to the result of the "Object to path" conversion.
And also, the simplification process should converge to a shape that is a simplification of the starting path without distorting it more than a small tolerance: if we want to be more general and accept a drastic simplification, any starting path should at least converge to the most simplicistic shape that preserves its characteristic topology, that is I expect an '8' shape to converge to a "perfect 8" shape (i.e. with the minimum number of nodes required to have an 8 shape) or, being even more drastic, at least to a circle. That said, I definitely expext a circle to converge to a circle!
All this considerations can be applied to any starting path, but defining if the approximation is good or not is difficoult. For a circle it's much more evident as the starting shape is perfectly simmetrical.
Also, I've noticed that in general if you ctrl-L a single path you get result A1, if you ctrl-L another you get result A2 and if you select both and ctrl-L them, you don't get A1 on the first and A2 on the second but something different for both. in my opinion this is not acceptable as I expect the operation to be applied on each selected object as if it was alone.
Thanks for the attention.
Regards.
tags: | added: node-editing |
summary: |
- Simplify path? + Simplify path does not work properly |
confirmed on Windows XP, Inkscape 0.48.
It does not always happen, but if it does happen, then repeated application of ctrl-L will eventually shrink the object down to a very small vanishing point.