Feature request: Splines/splinegons through given points

[Mortal]

A C implementation of an algorithm to draw a spline through given points exists in the tinyspline project:

Currently, Ipe only supports drawing splines with given control points:

Example source code

I drew the first image using the tinyspline Python bindings as follows:

import tinyspline
points = [5.26995, 9.95966, 20.8617, 10.6765, 51.6869, 65.5166, 29.4641, 66.2335, 42.3677, 9.60123, 58.3179, 17.3075, 66.3826, 32.5409, 69.2501, 18.9205, 68.1748, 1.71572, 65.6658, 18.0244, 69.9669, 30.5695, 82.8705, 29.8526, 79.6446, 18.9205, 86.8133, 13.1855, 97.9246, 18.562, 114.413, 23.0424, 112.262, 28.9566, 98.2831, 25.7307, 97.9246, 13.9024, 116.563, 9.06358, 143.087, 15.5154]
o = tinyspline.Utils.interpolateCubic(points, 2)
print('\n'.join('%g %g m %g %g %g %g %g %g c' % tuple(o.ctrlp[i:i+8]) for i in range(0, len(o.ctrlp), 8)))

There's a tinyspline issue about supporting splinegon interpolation in the project.

[otfried]

Adding interpolated splines has been on my todo list for many years.

The question is what model to choose. Xfig, for instance, has always had interpolated splines, both open and closed. Apparently they switched to a new spline model that can be both interpolating and approximating in Xfig 3.2.

At some point many Ipe users came from Xfig, and it would have been desirable to be able to support interpolating splines when converting xfig figures. I'm not sure how important this is today.

Does Inkscape have interpolating splines?

There are other nice splines - clothoid splines (http://libspiro.sourceforge.net/), for instance, allow you to have both continuous curvature and continuous slope, and look better than B-splines.

If you want to see interpolated splines in Ipe, please start a discussion on ipe-discuss to get some consensus of what these splines should look like.

[otfried]

Interpolating splines will be in 7.2.15.

[anusser]

This is a great feature, but I it was very hard to find for me. Especially because one cannot pick the spline type when right clicking on a spline. Does it make sense to add the spline type to the context menu of a spline to also help discoverability?