On 7/31/05, Elwin Estle <chrysalis_reborn@...12...> wrote:
Is there some way to turn off the "smooth" or "symmetrical" (I am thinking it is smooth), default which appears to occur when dragging a second handle out from a bezier shape node?
Just convert it to cusp. Press Shift+C or a button in the toolbar.
It is exasperating. I just get a curve positioned the way I want, and need to do something on an adjacent curve, but when I drag out a handle..."sproinnnggggg" there goes my carefully positioned first curve, then I have to unlock the handles with "make corner", reposition my first curve (again), and then move on to the second curve.
You can do it faster by using Undo :)
The reason for this behavior is simple: When a path is created e.g. by freehand drawing, most of its nodes have collinear handles. I assume that when editing, you want to preserve this collinearity more often than not - that's my experience and the experience of several users I know. Making a node a corner changes the character of the path in a much more drastic way than just nudging or rotating that node, and this is usually needed only for a few nodes, while the majority should remain collinear. Because of that, I made the Node tool to treat all nodes whose handles are collinear as smooth, i.e. to bind their handles so that they are rotated together.
Before that change, I typically had to dp Ctrl+A in node tool (to select all nodes) and Shift+S to make them all smooth before starting to edit the path. Now, if you really need cusp nodes more often than smooth, you can do the reverse: Ctrl+A, Shift+C. Both behaviors have their problems, but I think my case is more common than yours :)
Also, a few times I have mistakenly made a handle where I didn't want one. Is there a way to "return" the handle to the node?
Ctrl+click it.
Why do things slow down so much when I zoom in on a curve?
Our renderer is particularly slow on stroked paths in zoom-in. Hopefully this will be fixed when we switch to Cairo (a new renderer).