Simplifying a path

[Ottia Tuota]

Good. If you use it to smooth a path you may have to set the "Allowed deviation" a little higher. And if there is some troublesome part you can close it in a selection and simplify only it. It is a quirk of the plugin, due to how it works, that the result may be different when it is applied only to a smaller part.

(I might as well explain more closely where that quirk comes from: When we think of smoothing a path we naturally think it as a local operation. We think it as "bottom-up", and that would be one idea to try to design such a plugin. But this plugin works "top-down": Usually it takes first a whole stroke and tries to find an approximate Bézier arc for it. If it does not find a good one, it splits the stroke in two and tries the same for each half. And so on. But if the user restricts the operation to a selection, then the plugin does not start with the whole stroke but with the smaller part. This time it may find approximate solutions that it would miss otherwise. Calculations go different routes. It is a matter of luck actually.)

And restricting the operation to a selection you can set "Allowed deviation" higher without disturbing the rest of the path.