Inset seems to be going in the wrong direction

[dshookowsky]

This is one that's been bothering me for a while.  If I generate a DXF in Onshape and open it in Inkscape, the inset operation doesn't work the way I would expect.

It's not an outset, but it's like it did an inset on different regions of the shape.

I've tried different DXF formats, reversing the path, opening the file in LibreCAD and re-saving it there (it's worked before on other odd things).

Is there something I'm missing?

[brynn]

Welcome to the forum!

It's hard to tell what's happening by looking at PNGs.  Would you please share the SVG file (if you can)?

What little I can guess from the PNGs, it appears to be an inset.  But it's such a large inset, it's almost run out of space.  How are you performing the inset?

Each click of Path menu > Inset, or one press of the key shortcut will move the line by 2 px, unless you've changed it.  It looks like your inset must be something like 100 px.  (I'm just guessing the units are px.)  But we'll learn more once we have the SVG file to test.

[dshookowsky]

Thanks for replying and taking a look at this.  I've attached the drawing of the part that I'm working with - it's actually a DXF from Onshape (hence the "using Inkscape with other Apps" selection). 

A single inset operation produces the result you see there.  While googling, I did see something that indicated that the page units could affect the inset size or that small shapes had overly large insets, but none of that seemed applicable to this shape.

[Moini]

Those are not closed paths, inset can't really work with them. Think about how you would create an inset for a simple line.

You need to make them into a single closed path.

Select them all (Ctrl+A), switch to node tool (n), select all nodes (Ctrl+A), then weld them together (so that the 12 open paths become one closed path) (click on the button that says 'Join selected nodes' in the tool controls bar at the top).

Then do your inset.

[brynn]

Sorry, I can't open DXF files.  I need SVG file.