Join multiple curves with different stroke styles

[TLM]

Hi all,

First of all thanks for the great product, I'm loving it so far

I have a question regarding something I've been trying to achieve that I'm not quite sure if it's possible or what's the best approach. Please forgive me if my terminology is not 100% correct, I'm no expert at all on vector design, so I'll try to convey the right message with what I've learned so far.

I have a number of lines, they are all "open", so they are not connected to each other as they all have different stroke styles. You can see how it looks like in the screenshot. The problem is: as they are not connected or closed, when I export to SVG the result looks completely different as I suppose they're automatically closed on export, as seen in the second screenshot.

I've tried a couple of ways to achieve what I wanted, but with no luck:

• join the curves: this will make the stroke style the same for the joined curve, so I'll loose all the different stroke styles
• Layer > Expand Stroke: it correctly creates a shape out of the stroke, but it ignores the "dashed" style so I ended up with a unique continuous shape

As a last resort, I'm thinking about manually reproducing the stroke using nodes, but I though I might just ask here first as it will be very time consuming.

Please let me know if there's a way I can achieve this, thanks for you help!

[gdenby]

From what little I know of .svg, the drawing routine always closes lines. 

 

But expanding should work. I do that frequently. AD's expansion routine often produces more nodes than necessary, but for simple things like dots, dashes and lines, it does a fine job.

 

 

[TLM]

@gdenby Thanks for pointing that out, I actually tried again and realized that it does indeed work: the problem was that the gap between dots was too small, and the expand stroke was basically approximating everything to a single shape. Increasing the step did the trick.

Thanks for helping, it saved me a lot of time!

[lepr]

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