Sunday, November 24, 2013

Graphos supports Cusps!

Since many years, Graphos supports nice-looking and well known bezier-paths. However it always supported, by the design inherited by GDraw, symmetric handles. Since the handle points define the curve's tangent to the control point, there will be no discontinuity. That is, each control point's handles are equal and symmetric, allowing for smooth curves like here:



I added now support for splitting handles and making them a-symmetric, thus being able to draw cusps in a line.

While in path-editing (white arrow) a contextual menu will allow you to choose what kind of type the node is.

To support this new kind of information which is associated with each node, I changed the file format. Paths are now saved as a series of control points with their associated type, instead of the older format that was essential PS data, where each line-to and move-to was described. The latter format split information about each control-point between left-and-right and while more compact, did not allow to add the new information.

Anyway, here the result, left a smooth path, right the same path where the central point has been "split".





Note to self: this will allow to draw Graphos' own logo in Graphos much better. Something to do the next time I'm bored!

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Graphos 0.5 released

The GNUstep Application Project announced a new release of its vector drawing application, Graphos on Oct 15th.

Improved text object and handling, improved selection handling (e.g. for multiple objects that are group selected) and many other bugs. The format is 0.4 compatibile, although text object might be placed differently if loaded from old files, due to the old bug.