Line thickness inconsistency

**cursor** · 16 February 2010, 08:23 PM

While creating a schematic in Xara Xtreme, minipulating it's connective lines seems to produce predictably consistent results (in terms thickness).

If the same graphic composition is placed in a Flash (animation) document, the line widths are visually inconsistent ... depending on how I manipulate those lines with Xara Xtreme commands.

It doesn't seem to matter how wide the lines are (connecting lines in the examples provided are set to be 0.5pix)

Might someone be able to explain what's happening?

mercí =)

**Soquili** · 16 February 2010, 08:25 PM

Hi Curtis,

I'm not sure of the technical details but Flash doesn't do lines well.

You can try converting your lines within Xtreme to shapes before exporting to flash.

**cursor** · 16 February 2010, 08:38 PM

Thanks for your input, Bill.

You'll note that one of the examples I've provided does just that (Arrange > Convert line to shape). Even when using whole pixel values, the results seem inconsistent. If I could understand what Flash is thinking, then it would help in deciding how to handle the line widths within the Xtreme source document.

**Soquili** · 16 February 2010, 08:40 PM

Egg Bramhill is our resident Flash person

Perhaps he will be along to help explain how he works with lines and Flash.

**cursor** · 16 February 2010, 09:00 PM

Excellent. Thanks. =)

**ciroip** · 17 February 2010, 04:46 AM

I suppose is something people have to just live with: the Xara graphic engine is by far the best I ever used ( I remeber when age ago they tried to push the browser plugin for a high quality vector solution for web, before the svg or even flash became the hyped thing and I even wrote some python macro just to generate .xar graphs to use inside Xara). Whatever is not rounded to the 1pix resolution/1pix grid will have a different result on different engine and relative antialias). Xara born with the insane "zoom in" resolution (anyone remeber the microscope example?) so since the begin they cared how a 0.002 pix wide object should look at 100%. The flash engine is (understandble?) really more sloppy (and don't start me talking about illustrator or corel draw

)

**covoxer** · 17 February 2010, 06:39 AM

That's simple.
Flash uses different rendering methods for lines and shapes. The lines method is not able to render lines narrower than 1px. So if you have anything like 0.5px it is still rendered as 1px line. The shape rendering is more or less equal to the real supersampling.
Xtreme has no limitations in rendering anything including shapes, lines, text etc.

**cursor** · 17 February 2010, 01:06 PM

Thanks folks.

I just adjusted the all line widths to be exactly one pixel, and get better (more consistent) results. Xara's precision is appreciated.

**ciroip** · 17 February 2010, 04:11 PM

Originally Posted by cursor

Thanks folks.

I just adjusted the all line widths to be exactly one pixel, and get better (more consistent) results. Xara's precision is appreciated.

Another trick that help when you have to deal with this kind of drawing is to set the grid to

Major Spacing 10 pix
Number of Subdivision 10 pix
and obviously disable the Scale line Width.

This does not fix everything in every situation but is a big help (Xara devs should introduce a 1pix mode and 'correct' everything to a an "int" to try to fix exactly this kind of problems... )

**cursor** · 17 February 2010, 06:05 PM

In Flash, must all lines whose widths are all in integer pixel values ALSO be precisely positioned on integer X,Y locations? That is, if I have a horizontal line that is 1pix wide, must it's position values be integers (no decimal values)?

I'll have to toy with that.