Hi everyone,

I am playing with Spiro curves in Inkscape to understand their behavior. On Google Books, I found some explanation about Spiro curves and tried to follow the example illustrated there. However, I cannot reproduce the behavior of the half-smooth nodes.

Here is what I drew, following the example I found in Google Books:



Now, the book says that if a non-smooth node is next to a straight line segment, pressing Shift+S once makes it half-smooth. (Pressing Shift+S again will make the node full smooth.) I tried doing it to the cusp node (selected in the above image) so that the curve could transition into the line segment without a cusp (please see the image in the link to Google Books above). However, the node turned into a smooth node, even with a single press of Shift+S:



Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

(I am using Inkscape 0.48.4 r9939 on Windows 7.)

Seems the behavior is SHIFT+Y... maybe the keyboard mapping is off. Could be a windows thing... maybe they got flipped somehow?

Shift+Y makes the node symmetric, right? In my case, it still turns the node into a smooth one, not half-smooth.

I can now confirm the issue... SHIFT+S makes full smooth, unless the node has at least one extended handle.

SHIFT+LEFT MOUSE DRAG on the node extends a handle, then SHIFT+S makes half-smooth.

WInXP
Inkscape 0.48.4 r9939

Ah. So, a non-smooth node needs to have an extended handle before Shift+S can make it half-smooth.

Thanks, tylerdurden.