Stroke with pressure gets fractured with sharp turns

[D. Estabrook]

So I'm using pressure on a stroke.

I was having issues with it distorting when using "Expand Stroke" (where smooth curves were changed to chunky edges). In another post on this forum, someone suggested enlarging the object and then expanding the stroke. In doing so, I discovered this super bizarre bug. See the attached images I show when I zoom in to one of the corners. I also show the expanded stroke and all the countless nodes. This is unusable if I ever want to expand this kind of stroke. Am I doing something wrong?

[gdenby]

Hi, 828 Design,

I've had some result like yours, but nothing quite as extreme. 

Try this. Select the zig-zag section of nodes. Make them smooth, not sharp, and then use the smoothing widget. My experience is that most of the excess nodes are gathered into a smooth curve, tho' slightly distorted.  See the attached showing what happened when most of the teeth were corrected

AFAIK, the stroke is created by a series of "dabs", and the expand routine tries to follow the edges of the dabs. When there is a tight curve in a stroke, the dabs stutter. When the stroke is scaled up, the stutters are big enough that the expand routine can follow them. 

In this instance, not scaling up works better. The same shape shown in the attached when expanded at original size did not make the saw teeth.

[D. Estabrook]

Thanks gdenby, at least that's great insight.

Seems to me Designer is built to cater more toward the visual display of artwork than as a precise vector tool. The user shouldn't have to go through all those steps to clean up artifacts that the program generates (that's more work, not a benefit). Expanding a stroke should render the stroke with no distortion. At least that's what I've experienced in other vector tools.

Interestingly, I discovered this when I ran this file through a CNC Paper cutter (Silhouette Cameo) and the cutting head spent about 15 seconds cutting in that corner. It was following all those nodes! Even if you don't see these nodes, there is still something broken with the stroke expanding engine.

I'm super-impressed with the visual rendering of vector/raster artwork with Designer, but simple technical aspects like this that slow down my workflow are cause for concern.

I really want to be a fan, so I'm hoping this is somewhere in the backlog of bug fixes!