Joining curves for laser

[MiriamDema]

Hi there

Super new to Designer, trying to figure out how to fill in a gap in a drawing that I scanned, and imaged traced to vector in Inkscape and imported into Designer. I tried a lot of join options and under geometry and I'm coming up short on answers after watching a lot of videos. This is for laser cutting so the shape needs to be a filled shape, the laser engraves all of the filled curves. Hopefully that makes sense, I'm still new to this and don't know the right words to use. But I want the gap in the stem to be a continuous line. How do I do that? I think because it's a closed curve the "join curve" option is not available. But I'm not sure how to change or fix that. I've included the drawing and a screen grab of the break in the line I'm trying to fix. 

Thanks! MD 

MD2021Join.afdesign

[Gear maker]

Thank you for including the file.  What I did was to select the 2 nodes on either side of the gap. 

Click on Break Curve turning each node into two nodes not connected.  I separated the nodes slightly.  Then selected the 2 left most nodes and clicked Join Curves

Then the two right nodes and clicked Close Curves.  I ended up with two layers, basically the insides of your object and the outside.  I had to switch the order of these in AD so the outside was below the insides. Then selected both layers and did a Subtract.

Finally I did a little tweaking of the nodes to get rid of the bottleneck I had created.  Does this look better?

MD2021Join modified.afdesign

[MiriamDema]

Yessss!!! and thank you so much for walking me through that. I was able to recreate as well on my own. This is something I think I'll run up against in the future so I needed to learn how to accomplish it. Thank you for taking the time, I really appreciate it. 
MD

[Gear maker]

@MiriamDema You are welcome.  There are many people on this forum that are happy to help when issues come up.  I've never attended a forum that had so many willing to help.  One of the many valuable things about Affinity.  If we are stumped one of the employees would come up with an answer, but shhhh they are probably asleep now.

[Alfred]

10 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

shhhh they are probably asleep now

It’s only just after 9pm here in the UK.

[jmwellborn]

11 minutes ago, Alfred said:

It’s only just after 9pm here in the UK.

After the week they have had with Unsplash, it probably feels like 2:00 am to the Developers😱

[Gear maker]

39 minutes ago, Alfred said:

It’s only just after 9pm here in the UK.

I know but they have been working really hard this last year, or is it decade?

[Alfred]

17 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

I know but they have been working really hard this last year, or is it decade?

I think it’s rather less than a decade, but it may well feel like one to some of them.

[Pšenda]

4 hours ago, MiriamDema said:

But I want the gap in the stem to be a continuous line. How do I do that?

I don't know if I understood what you were trying to achieve, but I would do it this way:
- I would cover the gap with a rectangle,

- and then use Geometry\Add to connect it to the drawing.

- using the Node Tool, I would sequentially select and delete all four corners of the rectangle, so that the stem lines would connect and align.
  

- then I would fine-tune the stem (changed the Sharp node to Smooth, deleted the excess nodes, straightened the curves a bit).

[MiriamDema]

Thanks for adding that additional solution! I tried it on my own and it works as well. It may even be a bit more direct. It's so interesting with these programs that there are a few (if not more) ways to accomplish similar things. Thanks for adding the conversation. 

MD

[Pentoolist]

Thanks Psenda,

It's a really interesting way to solve the problem. I'm going to do some practice runs I will see if I can duplicate what you did. Thanks again!

[PixelPest]

I´d put it this way:

Drag node/s to overlap the gap till is looks quite right.

Then go Geometry->Divide

Then Geometry->Merge curves

Select 1 node inside the overlapping area - hit cmd+A to select all related nodes - then hit backspace to delete - Voilá.

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, PixelPest said:

Voilá

<pedantry>
Voilà
</pedantry>