XP1PathEd
One of the major uses of XP1PathEd is to see, and possibly change the ‘winding’ of closed curves. This is particularly useful if you want to use XP1MBoldn, which may make your object skinnier rather than fatter (or vice-versa) if the winding isn’t the way you thought it was.
It’s quite interesting to have a look at Trinity or Homerton: the winding directions are every which way.
Another use is to separate the elements of a path, either at all the control points, or just at ‘moves’. This can be very useful if you want to copy parts of several objects and then combine them to make a new object – you might use the same serif or the same curved stroke for several different characters, for example. In this case it is very helpful to relink all the elements afterwards.
When linking, you can set a ‘Gap close’ distance. Any gaps less than this between the end of one path and the beginning of another will be closed up by moving the two ends to the half-way point. The options when linking are to link all paths in the file; link all paths within any group; or link only where gaps have been closed up, or unlinked ends were already coincident. In the first two cases, links where gaps haven’t been closed up will be made with ‘moves’. Curves will be closed if the two ends of a linked series come close to each other. N.B. It must be the end of one line to the beginning of the next, not end to end or beginning to beginning. Use ‘Show Winding’ if you’re not sure which end of lines is which.
Non-path objects are copied unaltered by !XP1PathEd – except that groups may become ungrouped, and non-path objects may be put behind path objects. Most often you’ll be processing a selection straight from a !Draw save window, containing only the path(s) you want to process, and this issue won’t arise. It’s usually easy enough to fix up when it does.
N.B. Most of this app works perfectly afaik, but linking paths up doesn’t always, especially on complicated files. I only discovered this bug in October 2020... hopefully I’ll get it fixed before too long. But in the meantime it will do most of the things you’re likely to want it to do perfectly cheerfully.
If you find it useful, contributions to my pension are always welcome, but certainly not required.