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Bezier paths with look and feel like Illustrator


thecadman

Question

Please make the behaviour and look of the bezier paths like Illustrator or Freehand.

It is a standard that is well established and works well (like the wheel - no need for re-invention)

Also when adding points we need to be able to click on the path rather than on existing points (especially as sometimes you can't get a point in the right zone wherever you click and end up having to shuffle points around)

BTW the new Sketch spline is great - very usable!

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Or, at least, I wish an Illustrator / Freehand importing tool.

I currently use Freehand beziers for logos and free forms, then I export in Illustrator format. I import it in Cinema4D (a very old version I use just for this) and export from there as dxf.

When I open the dxf in Vectorworks, alas, the bezier lines are all converted into polygons (segmented in thousands pieces).

I suspect there is no satisfactory algorithm to convert true beziers (such used in Illustrator, Freehand, Photoshop) into the native bicubic spline engine of Vectorworks.

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I'have tried this little experiment :

Made a Bezier shape in FreeHand (5 points, 2 nibs and 1 bezier point with 2 handle points).

Exported as .ai (even .ps or .eps should work).

Opened in Textwrangler (or similar text editor).

Found the clearly visible sequence of 5 points.

Opened Vectorworks and created a similar shape (polyline tool) with this sequence:

angle point, bezier point, angle point, bezier point, angle point.

Modified each point coordinate according with values of the .ai file.

The obtained curve should now be the same as in FreeHand, but a superimposition of the two shapes (proportionally rescaled) reveals a mild difference.

Conclusion: bezier's algorithm used by the two programs are different!

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I have worked on the problem and went out with a plugin that is able to import paths from files saved as .ai or .art from Illustrator?, FreeHand? and other vectorial programs.

The importer is avaliable here: VectorDepot

There is a free evaluation copy too (limited in the number of entities it can import).

Waiting for a true usable quadratic bezier tool in VectorWorks, this can be a workaround for all of those users that can draw their artworks with other programs. smirk.gif

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