On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 17:14:12 -0700, Joshua A. Andler <joshua@...533...> wrote:
- With Illustrator, when you pull the handles out of a node, it is
symmetric until you release the mouse button.
Just make it symmetric (Shift+Y) if you want symmetry.
Basically, you pull the handle out of one side of the node and it automatically extends the other handle the same amount in the opposite direction (but once you release the button, the handles are free to move on their own).
What's the advantage of this? In Inkscape nodes are either symmetric or smooth, and it's easy to switch that.
The thing that makes this handy is that you can control how far the handles extend from the node, instead of them just appearing at a set distance.
The advantages of Inkscape approach are that 1) it is more obvious and 2) you can select any number of nodes and do Shift+S on all of them, and each one will be "smoothed" by an appropriate amount, depending on the position of its neighbors. After that you can manually adjust handles as needed.
The nodes are also basically cusp after that first mouse-up too...
Just Shift+C to make it cusp (handles will remain).
- Another benefit of node editing in Illustrator that may already be
possible in Inkscape (although I don't know how), is independently getting rid of node handles. What I mean is that if you have handles pulled out of a node, you can snap 'em back into the node (so they don't extend from it at all). This is also very handy.
That makes sense, I just implemented it:
* In Node tool, Ctrl+click on a node handle moves it back to its node.