Comment 23 for bug 263166

If this tool really "works as designed", that just means the design is wrong.

The calligraphy tool claims to simulate a pen [1], and a pen leaves a mark when placed on a page without dragging it [2]. That this issue is a bug follows immediately from these two facts.

My pen's ability to draw dots is not an "additional feature" (or wasn't advertised as such on the packaging). Rather it is an instance of its line-drawing functionality: specifically, it can draw a zero-length line.

Inkscape aims to implement the general case (drawing lines of arbitrary length), but the implementation fails in a specific case. Failing in a specific case is a pretty standard definition of what it means to be a "bug".

[1]: http://inkscape.org/doc/calligraphy/tutorial-calligraphy.html

[2]: try it.