Aaron Spike wrote:
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The "allowshorthands" option seems not used anywhere in Inkscape code. Does anybody know what happened with this option? (I have commented it out, so it does not show up in Pref dialog)
Indeed, it's not used. I'm not really sure (anymore at least) how it ended up in the preferences file. While working on the code to generate path data with relative commands I considered also letting Inkscape generate path data with shorthands (h/v commands), but finally decided against it because of the increased complexity and very minor gains.
Was the original idea that we would have different PathString implementations for different path optimisations?
Perhaps, but it definitely wasn't my intention. I used the "allowshorthands" option in much the same way as the option for relative coordinates (but as far as I can remember I only did tried it locally, and current SVN definitely does not use shorthands in any way, shape or form).
http://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/inkscape/inkscape/trunk/src/svg/p... http://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/inkscape/inkscape/trunk/src/svg/p...
Now that I think of it I'm not sure how that would work, but I seem to remember something like that.
PathString currently simply uses some dynamic programming to optimize the path data length by using absolute and/or relative coordinates (and eliminating repeated commands).