hello community,

i'm new to inkscape; mainly i want to use the program for cutting/plotting. One very important issue is the management of hidden lines.
The problem is already described in detail in this thread, but the answers are not satisfying and it's quite old.

The only other discussion of the topic i found is here but no satisfying solution either.

In my experience Bitmap tracing is not working properly and it's a hassle with very detailed images.

There _must_ be a more elegant way to achive this.

Many thanks in advance!

regards,

jules

Hi there.

There must?
Someone make an extension for it right now!

Oh wait.
At least, before getting to coding, can we get it straight, how it should work?

On the first link, there are two different kind of situations listed.
The Mona Lisa, if really flattened, would have anti-aliasing issues.
Also, the stroked path with no fill over a filled path would raise other questions.
Wether to convert the stroke to path and subtract it from the shape below, or not.

What would be with paths masked with a gradient?
How would they look flattened?


The other example, with the circles, shows something closer to what would be cut.
How would you automate that?
Selecting the topmost object in the z-order, then
checking if any of the objects below have an intersecting part with it.
If there are no such, going down in the z order, until there is an object that actually hides another one.
Then, perform a path-subtract boolean operation.
After that, check if the union of the previous paths hide any part of the path on the topmost path below, and so on.

To me it seems this kind of automation could take for a while on a detailed drawing.

Also, this approach would result in closed paths, which may not be necessary or maybe even better avoided for a cut-able path.
Getting down to the basics, there is not yet a boolean subtract option that deletes a segment of a path.


Not that I could code an extension for that, just some ideas.