Hi,

I've been using Inkscape quite a while now for tracing cartoon-like images. The paths usually end up having way too many nodes which is a problem for the vinyl cutter I use to plot these images.

I tried using the simplify path tool but it makes the path usually too simple and changes the overall appearance.

Therefore I use the path tool (F2) to select unneeded nodes and delete them, but this leads to curves which poorly resemble the original curve, so I have to adjust the curve by hand which consumes a lot of time since I have to clone the path first so I can see the original shape and adjust the simplified curve to fit it better.

I made some examples, see attachment demonstration.svgz.

I also formulated a target function for minimizing the distance between two curves and calculated the partial derivatives of this function. I'm pretty confident I will be able to use a gradient based method for finding the two control points which lead to minimal distance between the original curve and the new one.

Thoughts?

Sincerely Yours Alexander