Expand Stroke - Needs Better Node Simplification

[Dave Vector]

I felt I should resurrect this post from "Older Feedback & Suggestion Posts".  @MattP  indicated this was an important issue, and not trivial to implement (which I totally respect).  I was hoping this would get addressed in version 1.7, but it did not.  Can anyone from Serif talk about where this sits in the development schedule? 

THANKS!

Original Post:

On 1/19/2018 at 7:20 AM, Dave Vector said:

I feel compelled to weight in on this subject because I am not a math guy, but I sure do believe in math.

So, Affinity Design team, perhaps you can allow one of your programmers to weight in on this subject with a BIT of technical explanation to help me understand if it is possible to do this.

Please see the attached image:

• So I draw a spline with 2 nodes and 2 bezier handles, and with a pressure profile like in example (A) and (left-most A).
• When I expand that stroke (Layers> Expand Stroke), I get the result (B).  My reaction is "wow, really? That complicated off such a simple stroke?"
• If you have the mathematical description of spline (A) with the pressure profile (left most A) also mathematically described, Is it not possible to generate (C), (D), or (E) from those two mathematical descriptions? 
• (C) might not be entirely "legal" for some other software when it comes to bezier positions, but perhaps something closer to (D) or (E)?

I am not saying it would be easy, and perhaps I am over-simplifying things, but if you could implement this, you would have some very valuable code in the vector app creation industry, a cut above what Inkscape or Adobe currently has.

I would love to hear your thoughts!

 

MattP's Post:

On 1/27/2018 at 1:40 PM, MattP said:

Hi Dave,

 

its non-trivial to produce a mathematical offset from a cubic bezier that is correct. It is however possible to produce an offset that is ‘good enough’ that you’d never know it wasn’t right. We already have this code. I’ve said before that I intend to rewrite the expand strokes function to produce the actual offset curves in this fashion rather than re-fitting the expanded geometry as we currently do. I will implement this as soon as I’m able. To be clear, this is very important and will be done as soon as I can - but it is not trivial to implement and needs to be done carefully (ie not in a rush!) or the results will be just a different kind of wrong!

 

thanks,

Matt

 

 

 

 

[Dave Vector]

Serif and @MattP, any updates on this issue/idea?  

Fellow Affinity users: Would this enhanced precision interest you?

[Jowday]

On 7/23/2019 at 5:12 PM, Dave Vector said:

Serif and @MattP, any updates on this issue/idea?  

Fellow Affinity users: Would this enhanced precision interest you?

Of course. 

Thank you for raising the issue again, but expect 18 months of waiting before a fix is released - if it is ready for the next release. That is the average timespan between releases.