Hi, I've recently found Inkscape and after I've used Photoshop for 6 years and use it for various design and art related pieces of work, I obviously made the plunge into Illustrator. Now, while Illustrator is a great tool, I feel more at home with Inkscape, as I feel it's very user friendly. In fact, I love everything about it, except one particular thing. I hope you guys can help me.

My problem/query is as follows:

If I grab the bezier tool and draw around an object, at some points I can't stop the curve, when instead I want to create a straight line after the curve. Some screenshots are provided as a detailed, pictured guide - hopefully.



As you can see, I wish you stop from the middle of the bezier curve, to follow down the vertical line (yellow dashes included) of the spool of cotton, then curve back across to the start. However I seemingly can't. Instead, a loop is given.

So instead of creating that vertical line, I can only join back at the start, creating a shape as shown below:



I'm finding this really frustrating, a simple thing which would instantly convert me over to Inkscape and leave Illustrator behind. I'll show you how Illustrator works, and what I'm looking for, as another example:

Illustrator doesn't carry on the line after a left click, instead giving me the option of pressing Alt and left clicking the middle node to stop the line:



From here on I can carry on completing the shape, clicking the middle nodes as I like to begin the line from there:



PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE CAN YOU HELP. I've tried pressing and holding Shift after the bezier is created and other things, but I can't seem to stop the line in order to do vertical lines. A curved bezier is always given after another bezier curve.

Do you see the thin blue lines that are attached to the node, that have a tiny circle at the end? Those are the node's handles. If you hover your mouse over the circle, you see it becomes filled with red. Now, if you hold Ctrl key + click, that handle will be retracted. Since the handle describes or creates the curve, retracting it removes the curve. Now if you've practiced a time or 2, you notice that you only want to retract one handle, and not the other. Specifically you only want to retract the handle on the same side that you want the straight line to start.

And no worries, you can pull it back out again using Shift + drag (maybe not in this case, but if you're going to do a lot of node editing, you'll need it eventually). Please see my signature for some excellent instructional material

You can also do it while drawing, use Shift + L to get a line instead of the curve.

prkos wrote:You can also do it while drawing, use Shift + L to get a line instead of the curve.

Ahh thank you very much, yes, using shift L makes it straight again to click and drag if need be for another curve, or a straight line as you've described. Shift and U (as I've researched on here during my spare time) makes curves again.

This is great, I'm converted now! Thanks guys for your responses and time.

Might seem cumbersome at first, but overtime this may be the fastest way for you to work with: