Increasing an oblique line width

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ionut.iosub
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Dec 12, 2008 7:28 am
Location: Bucharest, Romania

Increasing an oblique line width

Postby ionut.iosub » Fri Dec 12, 2008 10:45 am

Hello!
I try to use Inkscape to make street maps starting from a satellite imagery. Some streets appear oblique, or not at stright angle relatives to each other.
I draw a line with Freehand Tool :tool_pencil: or Bezier Tool :tool_pen: , and then i try to increse it width to fit on the street from satellite capture. In a raster/bitmap program it's very easy, i set from the beginning the desired width. In Inkscape instead i drag the little arrows from the line edges. The result is a total messed up line, moved on another position, bigger then i need. So i spend a lot of time to rearange the line to a corect position and dimension, dragging each corner and node.
Is there any way to simplify this work? I've tried to google it, but no good answer was found.

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kelan
Posts: 178
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Location: Unicorn of Open Source
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Re: Increasing an oblique line width

Postby kelan » Fri Dec 12, 2008 11:04 pm

Do you want to increase the thickness of a line? You can do that by increasing its stroke width. Look in the Fill and Stroke Dialog (Shift+Ctrl+F) at the "Stroke style" tab. The top input is Width, which you can adjust as needed.

You might also want to set the either the Pencil :tool_pencil: or Pen :tool_pen: tool (whichever you end up using) to remember the style of the last line, so you don't have to keep changing the width. You can do that by opening the Inkscape Preferences (Shift+Ctrl+P), choose the settings for either Pencil or Pen under Tools, and set it to "Last used style".

Slow Dog
Posts: 180
Joined: Wed Sep 24, 2008 7:51 pm

Re: Increasing an oblique line width

Postby Slow Dog » Fri Dec 12, 2008 11:36 pm

As kelan says. To be clear, you should draw the roads with the tool set to have a stroke (of the width you want) , but no fill. Reposition the strokes using the node tool :tool_node: to avoid scaling problems.

Later on, after you've got your layout set, you might want to join your strokes together, then convert them all to paths, and use the Fill and Strokes dialog to make them coloured roads with black edges. But only when you don't want to move them anymore.

ionut.iosub
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Dec 12, 2008 7:28 am
Location: Bucharest, Romania

Re: Increasing an oblique line width

Postby ionut.iosub » Mon Dec 15, 2008 6:38 am

Thank you both for the good answers! After i read it i realize that i didn't put the question correctly (forgot about fill&stroke), but now it's ok. Thanks again!


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