While fiddling with freehand smoothing I remembered something from a while ago that I never got an answer for. Currently, freehand drawing produces a curve in which the nodes are cusp by default. There are other vector programs which do the same. However, it leads to lumpy lines which may not be desirable (for example lumpy contours in mapping are just not on). These are often fixed by selecting all the nodes and making them smooth. My question is why not make the freehand default node type for Inkscape to be smooth? Or at least make it an option in Inkscape Preferences? The attached file shows two freehand lines drawn in black The superimposed duplicate curves have had all nodes selected and changed to smooth types by Ctrl A/ Shift S. The resultant curve is much smoother. If this was easier to code, maybe it could be used as an interim measure while the heavy stuff in freehand smoothing is being fixed. Or is there something basic here that I am missing? vellum

On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 01:20:07PM -0300, bulia byak wrote: Currently working on graph layout stuff outside of inkscape. A couple of things have flowed to inkscape from that, such as a start on dia-like connectors in inkscape. More recently (after the freeze) I've improved the orientation of markers (arrowheads), continuing David Novalis' work ~a month ago. I haven't yet tried the test cases that were posted when this was last discussed, but it gives right-looking[*1] results for all pictures I've encountered where inkscape was previously giving wrong-looking results. [*1]: Let's say "conforming-looking". The SVG spec's "half way between the two angles" rule isn't really what humans want for arrowheads. Indeed, if a human placed arrows along a line, then they'd probably _avoid_ placing an arrow directly on a vertex. We know that end-marker arrows aren't handled well by the spec, especially on a path that curves sharply towards its end. We could summarise by saying that the SVG marker spec does fine for circle markers or even squares/diamonds, but isn't well suited for arrowheads in subjectively-most cases. Back to the subject of smoother freehand drawing: since we last spoke on the subject, I have done some cleaning of the code that I had, and I'll have another look once we've submitted the graph-layout paper we're working on. pjrm.