Dash Patterns from Inkscape : hilarious !

[ivan louette]

Fairly strange behaviour ! Hilarious and interesting !!!

Inkscape is very nice for creating customised dash patterns. At one time I forgot changing line to shapes before exporting them to pdf ... and I was amazed !

If I export lines with dash patterns from Inkscape through pdf they open very well in Xara with they original dash pattern created inside Inkscape.

But if I increase the line width in Xara like on the picture below, the dots count doesn't decrease and they became very wide strips !

Unfortunately if I try to convert line to shapes in Xara the dash pattern disappears ...

But fortunately, if I export the dashed lines to ai and re-import them into Xara, then I CAN CHANGE LINE TO SHAPE AND PRESERVE THE STRIPS !!!

I also tried to increase the line width in Inkscape and then the dots count decreases ...

Perhaps dash patterns in Xara doesn't match eps or svg specifications and that's what causes this strange behaviour. However that's a very cool combination.

kindly,
ivan

[MarcT]

Great findings!

I also like Expression 3's idea of numeric input to create dashed lines.
For example if you entered "3 5 2 3" it created a repeating cycle of a 3pix stroke followed by a 5pix space, followed by a two pix stroke and a 3 pix stroke at the end.

Marc

[ivan louette]

Yes I like it too ! And you can export the result as pdf and open it in Xara too. However it's an imported pdf limitation in Xara that you cannot change line to shapes without saving it as an ai file and reload it ! A bug ?

Could be very sweet to have a dash pattern editor in Xara. I am sure the code could be very light.

kindly,
ivan

[ivan louette]

Editing dash patterns in Inkscape with the XML editor is nearly as easy as in Expression 3 : https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/171996

[MarcT]

Could be very sweet to have a dash pattern editor in Xara. I am sure the code could be very light.

Agreed!

[MarcT]

Also some other "Easy" improvements that would make me quite happy:

-Variable stroke width with live tweaking
-Stroke sheering

Maybe someday...

[ivan louette]

What do you mean by Stroke sheering ?

[MarcT]

Hi, it is a "shear" applied to a stroke.

Marc

[ivan louette]

Yes I understand (your image comes from Expression3).

There were also a lot of postscript effects on strokes (invisible on screen) which perhaps didn't remain in pdf or svg.

ivan

[netsi]

Fairly strange behaviour ! Hilarious and interesting !!!
Inkscape is very nice for creating customised dash patterns...

kindly,
ivan

Hi,

I have created a free simpel online webpage for creating dash patterns, try it here: http://www.netsi.dk/xara/generateDash.html