Hi I am trying to follow the information in this image:
http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery ... aving1.png

I have a piece of text that I filled and blurred. Then I started trying to do the engraving using the pen tool. A couple things keep happening to me.

I need the lines to be very close together, whenever I try and do tracking the drawn line either wanders off (tearoffs) or the space between lines keeps increasing.

I am getting very frustrated and think that there has got to be a n easier way.

Does anyone have a suggestion for creating a bunch of engraved lines?

I can post a link to the file on DropBox if that is allowed.

Thanks very much.

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

WOW!! I had no idea that the Calligraphy tool has such a feature. That is so cool!

I did find this in the manual: "A slow steady hand works best. If the cursor is consistently closer or farther away from the guide path than the set spacing, the interline spacing will gradually decrease or increase. This is a subtle effect. Note: if the Mass value is zero, you may get small discontinuities in the path that disrupt the tracking. "

So if the space between lines is subtly increasing, that may be the reason. But if the other info I quoted doesn't explain or describe the other "tearoffs" issue, would you please post the screenshot? You can insert directly into a message, or a link would be fine as well.

Just based on my brief experiments, I see that I indeed have to go very slowly. If I go too fast, it will leave the track. Also, once the tracking circle passes the end of the path that it's following, it goes wonky. Or more precisely, once the part of the tracking circle that touches the line, can no longer touch the line, it goes wonky.

Now that is one cool function that I haven't seen before.
I couldn't exactly reproduce it though. I wasn't able to make the paths into equal distances between them, and I didn't understance how to do the hatching. I'd love to see a tut for newbies on this one, this assumes you know what they are talking about. But, I do see what you mean about the path going wonky, lol. I couldn't set the radii either, so all my paths were of varying sizes.

Although this feature no longer crashes Inkscape it is still difficult to use!
Tips:
-Watch the crosshairs of the 'C' cursor! Absolutely don't let it touch the tracked path! Once you start your stroke the circle size is fixed and the cursor can drift around quite a bit without detaching from the tracked path but if it touches or crosses the tracked path bad things happen! This can be difficult to keep track of when you are laying down very closely spaced, narrow lines - zoom in.
-Work BIG. Use a higher resolution bitmap!
-Start and end your stroke well away from the image. The ends of the strokes have the most problem!
-Once a stroke goes wrong switch to the selector, delete the bad stroke, select the last good stroke, and switch back to the calli tool.
-It's better to uncheck the 'select new path' box in the preferences. Of course this changes the output, and may not be what you want, by better I mean more stable.
-If you do uncheck this box you can improve stability even more by using a nice smooth path as a target. But don't use a spiro path !

For flamingolady -- It has to be a calligraphy line that was drawn previously. It won't work on a regular path (at least it didn't work for me). So first, draw the first line. Then it MUST be selected before you start to draw the rest of the lines. Hold the Ctrl key down while you move the mouse. You'll see a circle that's connected to the 1st line, and grows or shrinks as you move the mouse further away or closer to the 1 line. Once you have it placed as you like, press and hold the mouse while you VERY slowly drag the mouse. If you're going to draw more than one line, do NOT release the Ctrl key at the end of the line. Only release the mouse button. That leaves the line that you just drew selected, and as long as you have the Ctrl key still pressed, it will draw the next line the same distance away (or close to it, note my quote from the manual above).

druban, I don't think you can leave "Select new path" unchecked, unless you're just drawing one line....or unless you don't want the lines spaced evenly. I don't notice any difference in performance with that option unchecked (0.48.1 -- just dl'd 0.48.4 but haven't installed yet) (if I see 0.48.4 behaves differently, I'll post). Actually I haven't experimented with snapping, but perhaps that would offer some benefits for this feature.....somehow....?