I’ve made a new inkscape extension that detects defects in a path. There’s a zip file at the bottom of this post that you can download and try it.
From the readme:
Detailed Description
The Node Detector extension is designed to help vector artists and designers identify and visualize nodes that are positioned extremely close to each other within a path. It provides a visual way to detect potential issues in path geometry that might cause problems in various applications like CNC routing, laser cutting, or vector printing.
Key Features
Node Proximity Detection: Identifies consecutive nodes that are closer than a specified tolerance
Visual Marking: Adds colored circles to highlight problematic node clusters
Customizable Tolerance: Adjust the proximity threshold to suit your specific needs
Debug Mode: Optional verbose output for detailed analysis
Color-Coded Indicators:
Red Circles: Nodes that are connected within the same path segment
Orange Circles: Nodes representing path breaks or across different subpaths
What does it look like? Let’s say you have this grid of circles. One of them has an open path.
In the past, you’d have to go digging in the nodes to find them, it’s a manual process and not very fun. If you’ve done this, you know what I am talking about. If you’re an eagle eye you can spot the problem nodes, go ahead, see if you can find them.
Tis is a complex path, and there are many places it can go wrong when tracing or doing something like stroke to path. Running the extension finds two places where the path has a doubled up node, one closed (red) and one open (orange).
This is an early beta and it may have bugs. Please help me out by trying it. It’s been reasonably well tested but SVGs are complicated with lots of edge cases. It’s very possible that it might fail if you have a complex or unusual SVG.
Read the README. It tells you how to install and system requirements etc.
Kind of a weird use case but it would be very useful to me when cutting out foam board for RC planes to have squares and rectangles exploded into lines and arks with about a mm of separation .
At least in my install it did not show up under Modify Path but instead under Generate from Path so it took me a bit to find it!
After that it worked perfectly. It would be nice if there was a way to auto-delete all the circles, but it’s not like it’s hard to select and delete them while I’m all zoomed in on the area
This will make both vectoring bitmaps, and picking up art from random folks much less frustrating!
It will select all of the items that are the same color. Most likely it will just be the circles.
You could also choose select same object type. They’re all circles. If you have no other circles in your document then that would solve your problem as well. Once all selected just hit the delete key.
I didn’t finish the after as it is quite tedious to do manually, but you should be able to see I am a)breaking the path, and then b) setting the path back just a bit. This way I can color code the paths for cutting and several types of scoring.
Not really, what I ideally want is 1 tab per item. What I would really, really like, is to be able to select a segment of a line, click the button and get a 1mm tab on that line.
Lightburn has an automatic or manual tabs feature which works well for cutting, except I do all my designing in inkscape.
