Carol Spears (carol@xxxxxxxx) wrote: > i have been playing with many generations of TheGIMP this morning. i > compared the gimp's ability to make nice strokes and i found the results > to be interesting and revealing: > http://carol.gimp.org/files/stroke.png Interesting. I always assumed that the paintcore-based stroking has not changed. I no longer have gimp 1.2 installed so I right now cannot check why this apparently has degraded a bit. > can something be done to make stroking be at least as nice as it used to > be? i was blaming libart, but it was explained to me that this was not > the cause. The primary reasons for the bad antialiasing is that the boundary of a selection contains only horizontal and vertical lines. That is the reason why the results improve dramatically when the boundary gets converted to a path and then the path gets stroked. Details are discussed in bug #50730 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50730 What would help the stroking would be an automatic conversion of the outline to a path and then stroking this. We cannot do this right now since the selection to path functionality is implemented as a plugin and the core must not depend on a plugin. I had a deeper look at potrace (http://potrace.sf.net/) and have a stripped down version on my HD that does its job in about 2000 lines of C, which is a somehow manageable but still a lot of (sophisticated) code. I intend to look further in this and when it turns out that this might work I want to ask the potrace author if he has any concerns about the inclusion of the algorithm into the GIMP. However, this will take a while, especially since I'll try to avoid touching computers more complicated than my digital camera next week (vacation - whee! :) Bye, Simon -- simon@xxxxxxxx http://simon.budig.de/
