Hello.

I am an Inkscape novice, trying to learn the basics of the application by drawing a London Underground style metro map. Apologies that this query will probably seem ridiculously simple to those with more experience! I hope someone will be kind enough to give me some pointers in the right direction.

What I want to do is draw two parallel metro lines. Obviously if the lines are straight, it's easy: I just use the pen tool to draw a straight line, set the stroke to the desired width, and then draw another parallel line snugly against it (or duplicate the original one and change the stroke colour). It's more complicated, though, if the lines have curves in them. For example, in the south part of the Circle Line on the London Underground map, the District Line and the Circle Line follow the same course, including corners. If I draw a single line with bezier curves, and replicate it, obviously what I get is two completely identical lines, and the corners don't fit as the should with two lines following the same course on a metro-style map. I could try to manually adjust the curves on the second line, but I just know there *must* be a better way of doing it, which I just don't know about because I'm a complete rookie. I hope this makes sense.

Could somebody please give me a pointer in the right direction? As somebody who knows what they're talking about, how would you go about achieving this?

Many thanks in advance.
-james

You could try using the 'stroke to path' tool (Path > Stroke to Path). This will turn a single line into a closed path. Then use the node editor to delete the short segments at each end to leave two perfectly parallel lines. I hope this helps!

There was another recent topic about this, which received several replies with different ways to accomplish it. Finding it, however, will be tricky, since the title was something like "can Inskcape do this"....but I'll give it a try searching.

fyi, "can", "inkscape", "do", and "this" are all too common words for searching with But, it was only 3 pages back: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=19220 (I didn't remember "illustrator" was in the title, but that might have found it).

Rhysun has the answer above, but just to expand on it slightly, in case it isn't clear.

Use the pen tool to draw a path in the shape you want, and set the stoke width to the overall width that you want your parallel lines to be. Then do 'Stroke to Path. On this new object, give it a small stroke (the stroke would be the width you want each track to be) then remove the fill. Finally, as Rhysun states, go to each end and delete the 'joining' line between each of your tracks.

Hope this makes sense!

Dear all,

Thank you for these suggestions. Between all of them, I think I'm making some progress. Thank you all for your help.

Cheers
-james