I'm a bit of a newbie to Inkscape so please bear with me.

Until recently I was happily creating paths and using the Path->Inset/Outset tools to decrease/increase the size of the path. Recently however, the inset and outset tools have started exhibiting strange behavior for me. Have a look at this example:



The left shape is before the outset is applied, the right shape is after. As you can see, a lot of random rounding seems to be applied. Moreover, if I inspect the nodes in the right hand shape, a bunch seem to be missing and others have been moved around in irregular ways, with bezier handles going off in all directions.

I feel like there is some obvious Inkscape setting somewhere I've accidentally messed with. Any ideas?

All help extremely gratefully received.

What size does your shape actually have (in px)?

Based on my local tests with similar shapes, I guess it is around 40px wide and 20 px high? Path Inset/Outset doesn't work well with such relative small paths (relative -> relative to the inset/outset distance set in the preferences, default is 2 px).

Reported here: Bug #616469 “"Outset/inset path" act erratically if input path is small”

Edit: Attaching a sample SVG instead of a PNG would allow easier testing of your problem on other systems with potentially different Inkscape preferences in use - in case above guess was wrong and the png or screenshot is actually scaled down (or zoomed out)…

Yep - you're right - it's about that size. OK - at least now I know it's a bug. I was going nuts!

Thanks.