I would like to distort my path in Inkscape such that the top and bottom of the paths get vertically compressed (see attached image). This way things drawn at the top and bottom of the document will appear smaller at the ends of the egg. In Adobe Illustrator this can be done using envelope distort>make with mesh. I couldn't find a similar option in inkscape. My path has lots of nodes, so I don't want to manually move them to get the desired effect. Any ideas?

Quote by: Yorisimo

I would like to distort my path in Inkscape such that the top and bottom of the paths get vertically compressed (see attached image).

What is your objective in applying such a distortion?

In some cases, for drawing on spheres, you want in the 2D Cartesian Inkscape drawing to horizontally stretch the objects closer to the poles. That because when then drawn on a sphere or egg they will physically the be drawn smaller. (The circumference decreases as you approach the poles hence objects decrease in physical size as you approach the poles.) See

http://wiki.evilmadscience.com/Stretch

for a contributed extension which applies the distortion I mentioned. There is no extension I'm aware of which provides the distortion I understand you to be asking about.

Dan

Also, keep in mind that you can do all of your drawing work in Illustrator. From Illustrator, save your drawing as a SVG file. Open the SVG file in Inkscape and then use Inkscape to plot the drawing on the Eggbot.

Dan

I am doing the tesselation in the picture. Since the top and bottom of the egg are smaller, i also want the height of the tesselating unit to shrink as it goes up and down the egg.

I guess I will have to use Adobe Illustrator for this and import back and forth. Thanks for the tip on saving from AI as a SVG. I was trying to import an AI file in inkscape, and it changed my document size for some reason, which meant more futzing to get it right.

BTW, the latest release of the Eggbot software has a fix for an issue which one person was seeing with Adobe Illustrator SVG files. I don't myself know what that user was doing which generated the SVG which turned up the issue. I do know that a number of other folks used SVG from Illustrator without encountering the issue. So, you may well not see the problem. Here's the report of the issue,

http://code.google.com/p/eggbotcode/issues/detail?id=36

and here's the release notes for the latest Eggbot software release (which only just came out a week or so ago),

http://wiki.evilmadscience.com/Eggbot_software_release_notes

Dan