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Expand Stroke broken forever?


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? Expand stroke broken forever ? How so? I frequently expand thousands of stroke objects, and can use the results as I like, boolean operations mostly. Are you referring to the sometimes immense number of nodes generated? The smoothing option does not reduce the number of nodes dramatically, and can distort the edge shape. The only thing I can compare it to is Inkscape, which works a little better w. lesser numbers of nodes, and worse with equally large number of nodes. My recollection of what Corel could do about 15 years ago was that it worked better to reduce nodes, but only after tweaking parameters.

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The ‘Expand Stroke’ feature works quite poorly with very small objects, but if you enlarge them by a factor of 16 or 32 and then shrink them back down again after expansion you’ll generally get a good result.

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11 minutes ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

The ‘Expand Stroke’ feature works quite poorly with very small objects, but if you enlarge them by a factor of 16 or 32 and then shrink them back down again after expansion you’ll generally get a good result.

Nope... tried several times, it just gives wack results 50% of the time at any size

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I looked at some of the stuff I've been doing w. expanded dashed strokes. Indeed, small dotted strokes, at .24 pt are turned to irregular shapes. Square ones don't, FWIW. So I tried αℓƒяє∂'s enlarge and contract method. See attachment. A plus sign at 12 pt, dotted dash line expanded on the left. On the right, the same character scaled up 16X. In between, the 16X scaled down by .06. Seems to retain the irregularities in the enlarged version, but much better than the one expanded from the base.

DottedStrokeExpanded.jpg.8a521c416a5f66669046a47fcdf911f4.jpg

 

I wouldn't expect this work around to be a permanent feature. Its just a sort of sticky window frame in a house that still has some rooms only framed.

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3 hours ago, jorgesarcos said:

Nope... tried several times, it just gives wack results 50% of the time at any size

Any demonstration?

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  • 1 month later...

Im getting some oddities with expanding strokes also. Mainly when drawing with the pencil and pressure curves and using the butt-cap and bevel-join stroke types. Hard to explain the oddities, so i posted a screenshot, but mainly these happen with thicker strokes and when drawing tight rounded curves and tight angled points. I don't get any problem when expanding long sweeping strokes, only when the strokes "overlap themselves" if that makes any sense. 

 

expand stroke.jpg

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@TonyO You don't have a female bum in your shutter stock gallery lol!

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  • 6 months later...
On 8/17/2018 at 7:20 PM, gdenby said:

? Expand stroke broken forever ? How so? I frequently expand thousands of stroke objects, and can use the results as I like, boolean operations mostly. Are you referring to the sometimes immense number of nodes generated? The smoothing option does not reduce the number of nodes dramatically, and can distort the edge shape. The only thing I can compare it to is Inkscape, which works a little better w. lesser numbers of nodes, and worse with equally large number of nodes. My recollection of what Corel could do about 15 years ago was that it worked better to reduce nodes, but only after tweaking parameters.

Yeah. Must have been 20 years ago. CorelDraw on windows had a really functional "reduce nodes" algorythm. 

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I now use Illustrator CS5 kind of like a plug-in for this purpose plus a few other things that Designer can't currently do - if I expand something in designer and it produces a billion nodes I usually copy paste into Illustrator - Object - Path - Simplify - adjust curve precision settings around 97-99% and it does a brilliant job at keeping the curve quality but drastically reducing nodes - copy paste back into Designer - it plugs the gap a treat

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  • 2 weeks later...
8 hours ago, bandass said:

Ugh, sorry for that delay, I got tied up

Are you in the right thread?

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