I'm really not sure what to call this, or for whatever other reason anyone would actually do this. What I need to do is take a shape that I import, pick an axis point, and then be able to unwrap the various circumference distances onto a straight line. The easiest example to explain is a perfect circle and picking the central point. In this case, inkscape would make a line graph of the distances from the edge to the central point. Think of it as a clock, so starting at 12 o'clock, it would be 10mm (I just picked out of my head), then at 1 o'clock it would be 10mm, and on all the way around to 12 o'clock again. A circle would give a vastly different output if I picked a spot that was 2mm to the left of center. Does that make sense?

To provide some more details, this is going to be for an egg-bot type machine. I want to take an oval image, "unwrap" it so that it fits on to an image that is 3200 pixels by 800 pixels. I do not have the board yet, but I believe it is 3200 because the stepper motor has 200 steps per full rotation (360), and is running in 16x microstepping mode (200x16 = 3200). The 10mm in the above example would be correlated to the 800 in some way. I'm not sure I really need this much accuracy, but its nice that it is there.

Is there anything like this already available, or more likely, some tools already around that can be used in a new way? I know there are ways to wrap text on a circular path, but my inkscape skills are lacking in this regard.

I've also wondered if there are non-inkscape programs that could do something similar. Some photo apps may do 360 panoramas, and perhaps there is a reverse function? Not sure how accurate those things are, or how they may manipulate things to make it *appear* more pleasing to the eye.

In gimp there is a filter "polar coordinates" which can reverse map the image. Is that what you are after?

Thanks, I'll try that. I have also found 0-360 unwrapper which may work also. I'd rather do it in an image manipulation program so I can easily set distances/sizes.