Hey everybody, I've recently stumbled unto Inkscape and I'm having a blast exploring it. But I'm having a problem creating a string of shapes that can vary in size along a path (like the string of beads/circle thingys in this reference image). I thought it would have been an easy find (staying up til 3am probably didn't help though). I tried using the pattern along path and I was hoping that I could tweak the taper with a power stroke but they don't seem to play nice together. Anyone have any methods to share?

The image is huge sorry >.>

Hi !

I guess the simplest way is doing this manually.
Start with one circle, duplicate and shrink until you have enough circles, then arrange them as in your example.

But you probably want a way to automate this.


Draw a big and a small circle and convert them to paths.
Place them, so that there is a big gap between the two and then 'Combine' them.
Add a 'Interpolate Sub-Paths' LPE and choose how many circles you want.
Convert the LPE to a path and then 'Break apart'.
Distribute the circles, so they touch each other.
'Combine'
Add the 'Bend' LPE


A third way of getting the circles is by using tiled clones.
Select the big circle. Set the Rows to 1, and as many Columns as you want.
Scale X & Y by -10% (for example).

The problem with a simple pattern along path lpe is that it distorts the circle pattern, not just rotates the circles.
So an idea is to use a custom marker for small path segments of varying widths and lengths.
The stroke width can be adjusted automatically with the interpolate attribute inside groups extension.
To adjust the lengths of the segments, I would try a pattern made with interpolate subpaths lpe.
Not an easy or clean solution, and the overall shape is still limited by the linear interpolation.

Thanks guys . Will try these out!

Lazur URH wrote:The problem with a simple pattern along path lpe is that it distorts the circle pattern, not just rotates the circles.
So an idea is to use a custom marker for small path segments of varying widths and lengths.
The stroke width can be adjusted automatically with the interpolate attribute inside groups extension.
To adjust the lengths of the segments, I would try a pattern made with interpolate subpaths lpe.
Not an easy or clean solution, and the overall shape is still limited by the linear interpolation.

information overload

what do you mean with path segments ?

Let's say the circle pattern is made with a custom marker.
That marker may be added to path's starting nodes.
The size of the marker is assigned to a 1 px stroke in it's true scale, thus, to vary the size, more stroke widths are necessary.
Which is only possible on separate paths.
Separate 2-noded open paths with one segment each, sharing starting-end nodes, with lengths following an arithmetic progression.
For that, the interpolate subpaths or even the stitch subpaths could work.


Edit:
Here was a similar topic.