Outline ⇨ Outline Object

You can outline an object that does not have an outline. These can be shapes (rectangle, ellipse, parallelepiped, star, spiral) created with the appropriate tools, or text objects.

Rice. 1

Figure 1 above shows a text object as seen using the path editing tool ( F2). Below is the same object after Outlining and minor editing.

The resulting outline is a group of six objects and in order to change their relative position, you need to ungroup it ( Object ⇨ Ungroup).

It is also possible to edit objects individually without splitting the group using the same tool F2. To move one of the letters, you need to select all its nodes and move it to a new location (you can use the keyboard arrows).

Outline ⇨ Outline Stroke

Any path that has a non-zero stroke can be converted into an object that has two paths and a fill between them.

Rice. 2

New nodes are automatically created so that the two new contours are parallel.

Rice. 3

In this case, what was the stroke of the original (left) path becomes the fill of the new object. And the stroke of the new object must be assigned arbitrarily, so at first it does not have a stroke.

What is confusing is some redundancy in the number of nodes being created, especially at the points indicated by the arrows in Figure 2.

Rice. 4

But the redundancy is apparent; without it, parallelism would not be achieved, as Figure 4 clearly demonstrates.

Using this property, the command Outline Stroke often used to create parallel curves.

Rice. 5

Figure 5 shows the steps in this process (from top to bottom):

• Create a contour with a stroke of the required thickness.
• Let's outline it. Remove the fill and add a stroke.
• Select 4 end nodes and use the command Delete a segment between two nodes(in the tool settings panel Highlighter(F1).
• Ready-made parallel curves.

The command also helps to draw various polygons with uniformly rounded corners, as in Figure 6.

Rice. 6

Enough in the window Fill and stroke choose Compound: with rounded corners.

Contour ⇨ Sum / Difference / Intersection / XOR / Divide / Cut

This section of the menu Circuit contains six commands that allow you to perform logical operations with two or more selected objects.

Rice. 7

Figure 7 shows the effect of each of these commands applied to the objects at the bottom of the figure. Note that the original objects are not even paths (they are created by tools Rectangle to and Ellipse), and at the “output” of the command there are already full-fledged circuits with nodes and everything else.

Path ⇨ Merge / Split

The next section includes the commands Merge And Smash

Rice. 8

In Figure 8, on the left (1) ≈ the shapes already familiar to us (not contours), and on the upper right (2) ≈ the result of the Merge Contours command. As seen with the tool F2, these objects were converted into contours, and the resulting contours were combined into one complex contour of 8 nodes (as the message in Status bar on the bottom frame of the Inkscape window).

Bottom right (3) ≈ the result of using the command Break up outlines to object 2. Now these are two contours of 4 nodes each.

Contour ⇨ Pull in / Pull out

These two commands allow you to reduce / enlarge a contour by moving each of its points a certain distance inside or outside the contour. Since by default this distance is two pixels, the effect may simply not be noticed. To increase it, go to the menu File ⇨ Set Up Inkscape ⇨ Steps ⇨ Retract or Stretch to: and replace 2 pixels with 20.

Rice. 9

In Figure 9, the red star was first reduced in size ( Pull in). The resulting outline is made blue. The red star was then enlarged ( Pull out) ≈ green outline.

The red star is not an outline, and it retains its shape properties (can be modified by the star drawing tool).

Also notice the rounding of the inside corners on the blue outline and the outside corners on the green outline. This is an inevitable consequence of moving each point (not a node!) of the contour by 20 pixels perpendicular to the tangent to the contour at a given point.

Rice. 10

As shown in Figure 10, this effect does not occur for curved contours.

Contour ⇨ Dynamic retraction

The command combines the previous two, with the difference that it allows you to manually adjust the amount of reduction or increase in the contour.

Rice. eleven

For this purpose, special levers in the form of small diamonds are used, shown in Figure 11 by arrows. After using the command Dynamic retraction, the object is converted into a contour, a lever appears on the contour, the tool is automatically turned on F2

Contour ⇨ Linked retract

This command creates a copy of the object, converts it to a path, provides an edit lever, and turns on the tool. F2, which changes the contour.

Unlike the team Dynamic retraction, the original object remains unchanged, and the resulting object is linked (linked) to the original, like a clone with its parent.

Rice. 12

In Figure 12 on the left, the original is the red rectangle. The blue rectangle inside it is the associated path, manually reduced.

You can move the original red rectangle, change its shape (Figure 12, right), and the blue outline will repeat all these changes.

Outline ⇨ Simplify

The circuit can be simplified by reducing the number of nodes. Sometimes this leads to improvement appearance outline, sometimes (for example with fonts) to its deterioration.

Rice. 13

In Figure 13, the first outline was drawn with the tool Pencil, which always produces an excessive number of nodes. Circuit 1 has 208 nodes (the number of nodes is indicated in the message in Status bar), as they say, you can’t see the contour behind the nodes. Circuit 2 was obtained by applying the command once Simplify, it has 31 nodes. After a dozen applications of the command, a minimum of 10 nodes was reached, and the simplification did not go further (circuit 3).

Rice. 14

Figure 14 shows that oversimplification can significantly degrade image quality. Immediately after the first use of the command Simplify the green letter remained unchanged and had 31 nodes. After the second use, the number of nodes became 29 and the quality did not suffer. But when the number of nodes reached 26, the blue letter already looks bad. And it would seem that there is only three knots of difference.

Outline ⇨ Expand

This command changes the direction of the contour. The direction can be seen using markers that are connected in the window Fill and Stroke.

Rice. 15

In Figure 15, a red outline with three nodes was first created. Its direction is shown by the middle node marker. After using the command Expand the outline (green) has not changed, only its direction has changed, as evidenced by the marker.

There is another way to see the direction of the contours: connect the option File ⇨ Customize Inkscape ⇨ Nodes ⇨ Show path direction on outline. To make the outline visible, you can enable another option File ⇨ Configure Inkscape ⇨ Nodes ⇨ Always Show Outline, or you can, as shown in Figure 15, enable the display of the outline in the tool settings panel F2. The yellow outline at the bottom of Figure 15 has a red thin outline with directional arrows on it.

Last section of the menu Circuit will be discussed in the next chapter, since the topic Outline effects very extensive.

Exercise 1. Change the order of objects.

Select a star;

Run command"Object/Omit";

Select the rectangle;

Run command"Object/Bring to Front".

As a result, you will get the following order of objects: rectangle, ellipse, star.

Task 2. Perform mutual alignment of objects.

Select objects;

Run command“Object/Align and arrange...”;

In the dialog box that appears (Fig. 20), select the object relative to which the alignment will be performed;

Using the vertical and/or horizontal alignment icons, align objects.

Grouping, merging, and summing objects

There are three ways to combine multiple objects into one: grouping, merging, and summing.

At grouping objects are combined into one group and treated as one object. They remain independent of each other and can be separated at any time. If you make any changes to a group, these changes will affect every object in the group.

Task 3. Group objects.

Select objects that should be grouped;

Run command"Object/Group";

Grouped objects can now be converted as a single object.

Task 4. Ungroup objects.

Select a grouped object;

Run command"Object/Ungroup".

At unification the selected objects are merged into a new object that has a single outline and a single fill. The background object determines the outline and fill parameters. Common parts of objects become transparent. Merged objects can be separated, but they do not retain their original characteristics.

Task 5. Merge objects.

Select objects that need to be combined;

Run command"Outlines/Merge" .

Task 6. Split merged objects.

Select the merged object;

Run command"Outlines/Break" .

Summation does not save the contours of objects and deletes all their parts that overlap each other. The background object determines the outline and fill settings for the stacked group of objects. Summarized objects cannot be divided.

Task 7. Perform summation of objects.

Select objects that should be summarized;

Run command"Contours/Sum".

Intersection and exclusion of objects

Intersection and exclusion operations are performed on only a pair of objects.

The background object determines the outline and fill parameters of the new object.

Task 8. Intersect objects.

Run command"Contours/Intersection".

Task 9. Execute object exclusion.

Select two intersecting objects;

Run command"Contours/Difference".

Mladen Mihajlovic

How to divide a circle into equal parts in Inkscape?

Mladen Mihajlovic

No particular problem, I just can't believe it's as complicated as creating a bunch of lines and managing my angles and alignment - I kind of thought I was missing something and there was a better, easier way to do it.

Paolo Ghibellini

Sorry, that was a typo... I tried instead of problems. I agree, Inkscape misses out on some useful features, but you can always request new features. Regarding your specific question, sorry, on this moment I don't have a quick answer.

Mladen Mihajlovic

Answers

Socowi

The naive way is to use the Circle tool and its sector (pie chart) to draw sectors with the same angle. Press ctrl while drawing sectors to enable snaps every 15° (the snap angle can be changed in Edit > Preferences > Behavior > Steps > Rotation snaps every ... degrees).

The naive method is viable in a few cases (coarse subdivision, angles multiples of 15°, ...).

With some effort you can emulate the associated polar grid tool using mosaic clones Inkscape. For the next steps it is useful to use the binding options " center of bounding boxes", « tip nodes" And " center of rotation" .

1. Draw a circle.
2. Draw a line from the center of the circle outward so that the line is longer than the radius of the circle.
3. Move the center of rotation of the line to the center of the circle.
   Click on the line twice ( Not double click). + Must appear in the middle of the line. Drag + to the center of the circle. Binding is recommended.
4. Select the line and click Edit > Clone > Create Tiled Clones... *
5. On the " Symmetry" select " P1: simple translation" and press " Reset" .
6. On the " Shift" check the box " Exclude tile on line" .
7. On the tab Turn enter 360/N in the field Angle at line(replace N with the number of sectors you want, and yes, Inkscape can calculate 360/N, no calculator required)
8. Rows, columns"
9. Click Create .
10. Select the resulting clones and unlink them (shift+alt+d or Edit > Clone > Unlink Clone).
11. Combine unrelated clones (ctrl+k or Path > Combine).
12. Divide the circle using the combined object (select both objects, ctrl+/ or Path > Division).

1. Draw a circle.
2. Duplicate the circle (ctrl+d) and click Edit > Clone > Create Tiled Clones... *
3. On the " Symmetry" select " P1: simple translation" and press " Reset" .
4. On the " Shift" check the box " Exclude tile on line" .
5. On the tab Scale enter -100/N in the fields Scale X And Scale Y on line(replace N with the number of sectors you want, and yes, Inkscape can calculate 100/N, no calculator required)
6. At the bottom of the dialog box, select " Rows, columns" and enter N and 1 in the appropriate fields.
7. Click Create .
8. Select the resulting clones and unlink them (shift+alt+d or Edit > Clone > Unlink Clone).
9. Combine unrelated clones (ctrl+k or Path > Combine).
10. Divide the circle using the combined object (select both objects, ctrl+/ or Path > Division).

You can also combine both approaches to create a "radar". Simply combine unrelated clones (star and bull's eye) and use the result to split your circle.

* In Inkscape 0.91 Create Tiled Clones a little buggy. Often clones will be misaligned throughout the canvas (probably due to transformation matrices in XML file). The problem was fixed in Inkscape 0.92.
Temporary solution:

1. Create and place the object you want to clone.
2. Copy the object.
3. Create new layer.
4. Go to a new layer.
5. Paste the object in the same place (ctrl+alt+v) and use tiled clones.

Update: there is also an add-on for drawing polar coordinate systems. It might be easier to use a coordinate system like this to split the circle instead of using tiled clones, but I haven't tested the addon yet.

Mladen Mihajlovic

Wow, thanks for such a detailed answer...

The menu outline contains a number of very useful functions for working with contours. Find full list options can be found in the menu "Circuit".

How to work with paths in inkscape

The menu for working with contours is called Outlines

Let's look at a group of the most frequently used features:

For training, let's create a couple of objects: a circle - filled with purple, no stroke, and a rectangle - filled with green, no stroke. You can, of course, choose your own settings. IN in this example the rectangle is located above the circle.

First on the list is surgery. "Sum". It is easy to guess that a new figure is formed by the operation of combining (sum) two figures. Select both shapes with the mouse and apply Contour-Sum

The color of the new shape will be the color of the bottom object.

Let's change the order. Select the rectangle and press the key page down— thus we will lower the rectangle down. Let's do the summation again: we make sure that the color of the new figure will be the color of the bottom figure.

When you set a stroke, the new shape gets the stroke color of the bottom shape.

Next operation Difference. We draw two triangles: blue and red, with red at the bottom.

Select both shapes and “Contours” - “Difference”.

As you can see, a section equal to the overlap area of ​​our figures has been cut off from the bottom figure. The color is inherited from the bottom figure: as for:

Intersection leads to the formation of a figure whose shape and area are equal to the shape and area of ​​the figure along which two original figures intersect

For clarity, the upper triangle is made partially transparent. Next we apply to the same objects Contour-Intersection and we see, of course, a rhombus:

In this case, not only color is inherited, but also, for example, transparency and blur.

Operation Exclusive or results in the formation of a new figure by combining two original figures and removing the area where they intersect:

Contour - Exclusive or

Next operationDivide . This operation is very similar to Difference, however, the part that was previously removed, when Separation saved and can be used.

Menu Contour

Outline an objectallows you to show the nodes of an object's contour. When creating a shape, for example, a rectangle, with the selection mode (()), there will be setting nodes on the shape (two squares for resizing and two circles for setting corners).

If you apply this mode, two nodes will appear per node.

If you move them, this figure will change. You can also move the boundaries to another location. The figure shown below will not consist of straight lines, but of curved lines.

Outline Stroke allows you to remove the fill and leave the outline. Let's say there was a drawing of a figure - a rectangle. It has installation nodes (two squares for changing the size and two circles for setting angles).

After applying this mode, we get.

In the picture you can see that the inner and outer parts of the stroke are covered with nodes that can be dragged. In the previous mode, nodes were related throughout the entire stroke, but in this example there are nodes on the outer and inner parts.

The figure shown above also consists not of straight lines, but of curved lines.

Vectorize rasterallows you to create an outline in a raster image. Let's open a raster photo (formats. png, . tif, . jpeg etc.) and select it.

Let's use this mode and an outline will appear on top of the photo that you can move.

The mode window has the following options (shown in the figure below).

To perform the conversion, click on the button OK and then close the mode window by clicking on the button with a cross ().

You can also view the outline on the left side of the mode window by clicking on the button Update and OK . Unfortunately, this does not always give a new picture and you have to restart the mode. On the left side there are options for creating an outline, for example, Reducing brightness. On the right is the threshold value. Let's look at the resulting contours.

For Brightness reductions, value 0.3

For Brightness reductions, value 0.6 (more contours are found).

For Defining edges, value 0.65

For Defining edges, value 0.15

For Defining edges, value 0.10

For Color quantization, value 8.

For Color quantization, value 15.

For Brightness steps, value 8.

For In color.

For In grayscale.

After performing this mode, you can reduce the number of nodes using the combinationCtrl+ L(can be several times).

The following modes allow you to perform operations on multiple objects. Let's assume that we have the following original drawing with two rectangles that we will select.

Sum

Difference intersection

Exclusive OR

Divide

Cut outline

Merge allows you to combine several contours into one.

Smash allows you to split the contour created by the previous mode into separate contours.

Pull in allows you to retract objects (they become smaller in size, shifting the contour perpendicularly).

Pull out allows you to stretch out objects (they become larger in size, shifting the outline perpendicularly).

Dynamic retractionallows you to change the size of an object by moving the outline perpendicularly. After this mode starts working, a diamond will appear on the object.

If you pull it, the shape of the object will change (increase or decrease).

Related retraction, just like the previous mode, sets a rhombus on the figure, by moving which you can change the size, shifting the contour perpendicularly.

If you pull the diamond, the size of the figure will change. In this case, the original figure will remain. If you increase the size, apply this mode, increase the size, we get.

You can resize not only the last contour you made, but also the previous ones. In this case, the contours that are made will also change their size. To do this, you need to click on the desired shape (you can use this mode again) and a diamond will appear on the stroke of this shape, which you can drag.

Simplify allows you to reduce the number of nodes of the figure. Let's create a curve using a pencil ().

Then let's go to node editing mode ().

As you can see, the curve has quite a lot of nodes. In order to reduce the number of their nodes, you can use this mode.

An alternative to this mode is to use the keysCtrl+ L. If you press these keys quickly, the number of nodes may be reduced.

Expand allows you to expand the figure. That is, if a straight line had a beginning and an end, then after executing this command they will change places.

Contour Effect Editorallows you to change the outline of a figure. In order to use this mode, you need to select a shape (one) and apply this mode. The mode window will appear on the right side of the window.

Let's assume we have a rectangle shape.

You can apply various effects to it, which are available in the drop-down menu. After selecting the mode, you need to click on the button Add .

These can be the following effects (first a picture is shown with examples of the effect, then a list of parameters) (several different effects can be applied to a figure):

Internal hatching,

Envelope deformation (allows you to change the outline by dragging along the diamonds that are located at the corners of the figure. In order for the diamonds to appear, click on the button - in the effect parameters) ,

Bend(allows you to change the outline if you drag along the diamonds that are located at the corners of the figure) ,

Subcontour interpolation (allows you to change the outline if you drag along the diamonds that are located at the corners of the figure) ,