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Modeling Menus

Convert to Spline (command)

Make an editable spline from the selection, keeping the shape and hiding the original.

Menu: Edit > Convert to Spline | In depth: Splines

[!IMPORTANT] Under construction. Splines are new and this page describes work in progress. Nothing here is a promise about the finished feature.

What it takes, and what you get

It converts an imported outline, a circle, an ellipse, a region, the result of a boolean, a segment, or an arc.

What you get is a new spline with the same shape, carrying the original's style across as a copy. The two objects are separate from then on, so restyling one leaves the other alone.

It runs over the whole selection in one undo step, and the new splines become the selection, so whatever you converted for is the next thing you act on.

The original is hidden, not deleted

The original is hidden, not deleted. It is still in the Layers panel with its eye off.

That is worth saying twice, because it is the whole safety net: the exact original is how you get the precise shape back. A converted circle is a spline that happens to be round, and the real circle is still there, hidden, where you left it.

One way only

There is no command that turns a spline back into a circle. A spline that happens to be round carries no record of ever having been one.

An arc becomes cubic curves on the way across, accurate to 2.7 parts in ten thousand of the radius, which is 0.026 mm on a 100 mm radius.

What it turns down

Four things come back refused, each with its own sentence:

It is already a spline.
A line and a ray have no ends to convert, since both run forever.
A group converts a part at a time, so select inside it.
Nothing there to convert, which is also what an elliptical arc reports, since that one does not convert yet.

A mixed selection is the normal case, since you select a figure and some of it turns out to be a guide or a label. Those are reported rather than failed on: you are told how many converted and how many were left alone, with the commonest reason named.

Splines: what an editable spline is.
The Pen: drawing one from scratch.
Importing SVG: where an imported path comes from.
The Layers panel: the hidden original, and how a path and a spline are told apart.