Offset from polyline

[Steve Hausz]

Recently, I've done some very intricate work to create stencils for decorative painting. Think vines and leaves, etc.

I use the polyline tool to trace over a scanned image, drawing a portion of a vine for instance, knowing that I'll need another line consistently 1/4" away from it.

I find the cubic vertex mode to be easiest to draw with in the first place, and easiest to do the inevitable adjustments to fit the curves to the original. I then use the offset tool to create the other line, ultimately using "compose" to join all the different drawing components to one another.

The huge problem is that the offset copy might have hundreds of closely spaced vertices in it, making it impossible to edit. It's worst with bezier or cubic vertex mode, not as bad with arc vertex.

A lot of the vertices are also corners, instead of curve vertices. Smoothing command is of no help. The only work-arounds that I can come with are either taking a lot of time to remove all the unwanted vertices, or to lock the curve and use it as a guide to draw a new one on top of it, then deleting the guide.

Any solutions out there? Can this be fixed in the future?

[Biplab]

If you can, please submit a bug thru bugsubmit@nemetschek.net and we will look into fixing this issue.