Inkscapers,

I just noticed that inkscape uses elliptical arcs in its path data (not if you draw a path, only if you draw an ellipse -- but it uses the <path> element rather than an <ellipse> element I guess because <ellipse> cannot represent rotated ellipses or elliptical arcs.) However, it seems that any sort of union or offset on these ellipses causes them to be converted to bezier curves. (Simplify seems to also convert them.)

Xar only supports bezier curves in the path data, so this would have to be converted. It looks like postscript conversion has a similar issue in that its arcto does not support ellipses.

From the info that I've been able to find, an ellipse can only be

approximated with a quadric bezier curve. Is that correct?

Can anyone please give me some hints as to whether the inkscape source has anything that would be generically usable for converting ellipses to bezier? I've been digging through the source starting with extension/internal/ps-out.cpp and it appears to be leading me to ps.cpp, but I think I missed the conversion.

Thanks, Eric