Inkscape

Repair an open vector

Asked by John Reckel

I spent a day searching the internet for an answer to this and can't find one.

I imported DXF files that have incomplete (unclosed) vectors of odd gears. Quite complex.

I want to cut them with a CNC, but specifying an inside or outside cut is impossible because there is no inside or outside of an open shape.

I read somewhere that inkscape (I think) would smooth or something a vector with a tolerance or something and end up repairing such vectors. I can't see the breaks, so they must be very tiny.

For an idea of what these gears look like, see http://lisaboyer.com/Claytonsite/weirdgears1.htm

Any help would be gratefully accepted.

John

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Hachmann (marenhachmann) said : 		#1

Hi John,

I've tried this now for the first time and can confirm it works with both 'join' options (at second try, the first try created non-sense for whatever reason...):

according to the info in this bug report here, it should easily be possible:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/321150

Quote (Krzysztof Kosinski):

"Just select all affect nodes and select "join nodes" from the controls bar. The nodes will be joined according to a pairwise nearest neighbor algorithm."

Kind regards,
 Maren

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John Reckel (john-e-reckel) said : 		#2

I'm VERY new to Inkscape, so bear with my newbie questions.

Is there a way to select the whole drawing, containing several separate gears, and have it fix up all these broken lines/strokes/nodes?

Not sure of the proper terminology.

I bought a set of plans for these oddly-shaped gears. They came in DXF format. They are apparently good, printable drawings for manually cutting out the parts with a bandsaw, but turning them into gcode is getting difficult. The machine moves to a spot, drills down, moves a couple of thousandths, lifts up, moves a couple of thousandths, drills down, moves a couple of thousandths, etc. It did this 33 times to form an arc that was not quite 180 degrees. The machine may be worn out before it completes 14 pages of these goofy gears.

John

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Hachmann (marenhachmann) said : 		#3

Yes. As I wrote, there is a way. Follow the steps below to (hopefully) get your desired result.

Step by Step (using keyboard shortcuts, because describing buttons takes longer and I cannot add any screenshots here):

1. Hit Ctrl+Alt+A to select everything in all layers in the drawing.
2. Ungroup (Ctrl+U) repeatedly until the status line no longer says that your selection contains groups, but only paths.
3. Switch to node tool
4. Press Ctrl+A to select all nodes in all selected objects
5. Hit Shift + J to join all end nodes with their nearest neighbour

6. Check if all shapes have been preserved. If that was not the case, do Undo, then for the next try, exclude those objects from the selection before you switch to node tool in step 3.

Kind regards,
 Maren