the offset quality is dependent on the simplification quality, especially the "correct" version. for the time being, i leave the bad version (selected by setting the global use_slow_but_correct_offset_method to false). apparently illustrator does exactly the same kind of errors in its offsets, so i suppose they have taken the same method. its advantage is that it's faster, and easier to recombine in curves. but i still haven't found a nice way to have a treshhold that depend on the "detail" size (like for the "good" version), so the simplification can eat some details. as far as simplification is concerned, it's probably wiser to leave someone else come up with a good algorithm (and to not default to Coalesce(), which is sometimes too strong).

I tried use_slow_but_correct_offset_method = true, which gave good results indeed, but froze and crashed soon :( So I guess we should leave it at false for now. As for the current method, again, if it gives correct results for large objects, what prevents you from "tricking" it so it believes all objects are large enough for the artifacts to never appear?

also, when you say "simplification", i assume you mean (a bit) "smoothing".

Yes, that's what is often needed in design, and what most people expect when they do "simplify": reduce the number of nodes making the path smoother.

The simplify() functions don't do smoothing at all; they were intended to remove very small segments in the path description, that's all.

So I guess it's useful for doing simplification as part of the offset, but not usable for standalone Simplify command.

i can't remember what the defaults were for yesterday's sp_selected_simplify(), but i don't think i have done major changes to the behavior of simplify. it's probably just the difference between justCoalesce=true and justCoalesce=false

Yes! options.simplifyjustcoalesce was 1 by default, now I changed it to 0 and it works very well again! With the starting threshold of 0.003 * size, it gives a very smooth transition from the original shape to the degenrate two-node path, preserving the original outline as good as it can on every step. Thanks, and please do not change the algorithm used by the standalone Simplify anymore! :) (you can of course tweak the algo used by offset, to fix the distortions, if this is possible at all)

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