Hi,

I need to draw a symbolic chart which shows a rising trend line (with some fluctuation).

The trend line should have a bold stroke and its boldness should be emphasized by one or more good-looking 3D effects.

I tried the "Generate from Path" extensions Interpolate and Extrude, but with Interpolate (between the original and a duplicate of the trend path), the result looks poor because it is not antialiased. This problem should not occur with Extrude, but Extrude needs rectangles instead of a line sequence.

Now, the result of my experiments are three questions:

• Can interpolations be antialiased somehow?
• Can I convert line segments to filled rectangles? (in order to extrude them)
• Are my approaches the only choices I have or can you recommend better suited approaches/effects (maybe a tutorial)?

Thank you
Chris

Hi,

every vectors look sharp in inkscape, even the interpolation.
Maybe you wanted a group of some paths on eachother to create a solid transition edge? Well that won't work, not because of anti-aliasing.

You can extrude paths.

There are many effects in the filter section that you could use to add a 3D shading,
but which are many raster based, so with them there could be issues of anti-aliasing when exporting to png.

Could you show us an example image on what kind of look you want to achieve?

Hope this is a marketing type graph, as graphs that are actually trying to show things (clearly) do not use 3D or other visual candy.
An often used "good looking" effect is a simple drop shadow, with a tiny bit of blur. Otherwise knock yourself out and use povray to create raytraced graph in full 3D with textures and all.