Hi Crusoe - there are tons of cool things in Inkscape, no doubt. In the future I would like to incorporate some of this type of 2D illustration flavored stuff.

However, the "drag directly on curve" inside of Inkscape has the same problem as Adobe Illustrator - again, it kind of goes hand-in-hand with the segmented nature of Bezier editing.

Here are some screenshots from Inkscape to illustrate:



Here you can see that I grabbed a point on the curve not far from the end node, and dragged upwards not too far. This produced a big shift in the curve, the tangent has swung around about 90 degrees from this small distance, and kind of a bulge developed on the other side of the node.

This is because during the "point on curve" dragging, the end nodes are fixed in position. The bezier segments are the portions in between each of those on-curve nodes.


If you compare this to MoI's NURBS based dragging, you won't see any "fixed in place" portions of the curve during the drag like this. This is because NURBS allows for a single segment with more than 4 points in it. Beziers are limited to segments that are made up of only 4 points, and a longer curve is a string of these 4-point segments sort of glued end to end.

That's just one area where the NURBS approach makes for smoother processing since you can have longer segments. The actual geometric smoothness of the curve is better with NURBS, Beziers have breaks in the curvature between each of the little 4 point segments unless every single node is set to the symmetrical type...

The editing in Inkscape is a lot friendly overall than Adobe Illustrator though - I've always had difficulty selecting stuff in Illustrator, they made it pretty hard to target the little points in there, the interaction feels pretty nice inside of Inkscape in comparison.

- Michael