Sculpt tool (roughen) has no effect after a few moments of usage

[Mihai Sorin Dobrescu]

Sculpt tool set on roughen parts of paths has no effect after a few moments of usage.
Draw a circle with the ray of 450 px and try to use the tool on the border. The tool is set to have width 10 and force 50. Sometimes it breaks the circle and a small trace of it remains. Sometimes it just roughen the border of the circle for 15 degrees, then it has no effect at all no matter what I do (select/deselect the object, select it again and try to apply the tool). For lines drawn with calligraphic tool it just apply at one end, for a small segment. Then no effect.

I have tried it on Windows Vista x86 and Windows 7 64 bit, installed on a i7 920 machine with 6 GB or RAM and an nVidia 7200GS card.

The version of Inkscape: 0.48.0-1.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Reproduced with Inkscape 0.48+devel r9799 on OS X 10.5.8

When the tweak tool fails to further roughen the selected circle/path, there are repeated console messages:
** (inkscape-bin:5291): WARNING **: Shape error in ConvertToShape: directedEulerian(a) == false

[Mihai Sorin Dobrescu (msdobrescu-gmail)]

This affects 0.48.2 also, in a different way.
Sculpt tool could be applied several times (2-3) before it becomes ineffective.
Sometimes, after transforming rectangular shapes to paths, it doesn't affect them for a great roughness until the lines are modified by acting on their handlers. It just moves the points.
I would have expected to modify the rectangular shape as in case of ellipses.

After exiting the tool and re-entering, it doesn't act at all.

I would really need this tool for some graphic design projects of mine...

[Mihai Sorin Dobrescu (msdobrescu-gmail)]

Thank you!

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Same issue was reported earlier in
Bug #322644 “roughen tool fails”
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/322644>

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Listed among the known issues in the release notes for 0.46:
«Also, sometimes after roughening, further tweaking of a path becomes impossible with this diagnostic:

 WARNING **: Shape error in ConvertToShape: directedEulerian(a) == false

All these problems stem from the livarot library that we use for geometric manipulation of paths. Fortunately, livarot is scheduled for replacement by lib2geom, a new library now in development, so hopefully these issues will be addressed then. »
<http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.46#Known_problems>

[John Smith (john-smithi)]

> livarot is scheduled for replacement by lib2geom
Is this work planned for 0.49 ?

[ScislaC (scislac)]

No one has expressed interest in taking it on that I'm aware of.

[John Smith (john-smithi)]

> No one has expressed interest in taking it on that I'm aware of.
Should the milestone be changed then ?

[ScislaC (scislac)]

I think we can leave as-is until the proposed release plan is discussed on the devel list. I'm planning to put that forth in a few weeks or so.

[Mihai Sorin Dobrescu (msdobrescu-gmail)]

Please...

[ScislaC (scislac)]

Mihai: I'm really sorry about that. Unfortunately everything in Inkscape is driven by volunteers. We don't have any paid developers, and there are technical reasons why 2geom can't replace livarot yet. Unfortunately it is unlikely that anyone will step up implement what is needed prior to 0.49 being released. The milestone was originally set as an optimistic goal, but we want to get 0.49 out before the end of the year.

[Mihai Sorin Dobrescu (msdobrescu-gmail)]

So no plans fot it in 0.91, 1.0...?