Dear Inkscape-devel,

I am not sure if this is a design decision, but when I draw a cubic Bezier straight line on canvas, it would always get converted to a linear segment (no tangent node handles) automatically. This seems to happen in other scenarios (specifically in LPE) as well. 

This causes a little bit of an issue when I work on an LPE that requires having cubic bezier output, even for straight line, to maintain C1 smoothness across path segments. However, this automatic conversion will break my curve continuity, because I don’t have the tangent “node” to define for a linear segment that is connected to a cubic segment.

In src/helper/geom, there is a method pathv_to_cubicbezier() that does this conversion, but it’s tricky: the tangent handles are somewhat “hacked” by adding small amount of offset to make the curve actually not perfectly linear. Although visually it maybe ok, but for scenarios that we care about precision, we may want strict linear segment to retain as-is, even though it’s in cubic form.

Is there a way to turn this automatic conversion off?