Equal tapered ends on all line lengths

[Bob Hahn]

Both of these lines have a 3pt line width and a ellipse stroke shape.

One line is much longer in length than the other and as you can see in the red circled area, the widths of the ends are different between the two as the length of the line effects how the ends taper.

What I would find useful, is the ability to draw an ellipse line stroke at any length and have it taper at a constant rate. So no matter what length the line is, the tapered ends are equal - more like the example shown on the right.

Bob.

[Albacore]

So would I Bob as it would make drawing lines in a cartoon so much easier. At the moment you have got to mess around with the line thickness so it just about looks OK! This is a strong "Dear Xara" in my opinion.

[handrawn]

+1 Bob

any sensible way of customising the stroke shapes gets my vote

[ZEBtoonz]

Yeah, Bob, I'd like that too! I've been coming up with workarounds for lines like this--I clone the line and then break and delete the middle section so that the ends are tapered as in your second example.

Another problem comes up when you have a line that's tapered on both ends that intersects with another line (see pic). You want the part of the first line that intersects not to be tapered. So I usually leave the end node and then make a short extension that flows into the second line.

[morphonius_821]

Now this has been brought to my attention (not having used the brush functionality yet) this seems like an obvious issue to be fast tracked.

However I can understand why the brush tool may have been set up this way in the first place, as stretching the brush totally along the line's length does add something to this tool giving it a more of a sketchy/brushy feel.
But admittedly the effect does degrade when (with out limits) the brush is stretched ridiculously when applied to really long lines.

But I think totally eliminating the brush stretching would mean reverting to just having boring capped ends.

So I would say the answer is to maintain this feature but to introduce some extra functionality to switch stretching on or off and/or to throttle it....

IE...
1) Capped ends (no stretching of the brush)
2) the way it is now...(Brush stretching to the full extent of the line length)...
3) then a third manual control option:

This manual control option could be as simple as:
1) a maximum taper extent parameter
(for example this could be the maximum extent of the the taper zone in units that represent the current size of the stroke width...
i.e. so 10 would mean that the taper zone's max length would be 10x the current stroke width. )
2) a throttle factor.
(this would control how this taper zone related to the line length... so that the user could control to what extent (a big or small one) that the line length had on the taper zone and thus how long the line would have to get to induce maximum brush stretch and thus a full size taper zone.)

Anyway food for thought...
I just feel that totally eliminating the brush stretch would = capped ends.
So to keep the sketchy feel and user control this new scheme or something like it would add more flexibility rather than simply totally eliminating brush stretch and resulting in just boring capped ends.

[Bob Hahn]

I agree with what you say.

My point was never about eliminating a current function, but adding more user control to the existing function. Rather than resorting to work-arounds like breaking line segments to achieve the desired results.

When you need to find and use a work-around, that's when you start thinking that there must be an easier and faster way.

Bob.