On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 01:20:07PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
[Peter Moulder has looked at improving smoothness of freehand drawing.] I don't know why it was never finished. I really hope it will be done some day.
Currently working on graph layout stuff outside of inkscape. A couple of things have flowed to inkscape from that, such as a start on dia-like connectors in inkscape.
More recently (after the freeze) I've improved the orientation of markers (arrowheads), continuing David Novalis' work ~a month ago. I haven't yet tried the test cases that were posted when this was last discussed, but it gives right-looking[*1] results for all pictures I've encountered where inkscape was previously giving wrong-looking results.
[*1]: Let's say "conforming-looking". The SVG spec's "half way between the two angles" rule isn't really what humans want for arrowheads. Indeed, if a human placed arrows along a line, then they'd probably _avoid_ placing an arrow directly on a vertex. We know that end-marker arrows aren't handled well by the spec, especially on a path that curves sharply towards its end. We could summarise by saying that the SVG marker spec does fine for circle markers or even squares/diamonds, but isn't well suited for arrowheads in subjectively-most cases.
Back to the subject of smoother freehand drawing: since we last spoke on the subject, I have done some cleaning of the code that I had, and I'll have another look once we've submitted the graph-layout paper we're working on.
pjrm.