Consider using Clipper library instead of geometry/pathfinder.coffee

[jarek-foksa]

Path clipping is a tough mathematical problem that requires some non-trivial code. Instead of trying to do it yourself I would use JavaScript Clipper [1] library. Clipper doesn't have full support for Beziers yet (it's being worked on in the upstream branch, for now you would need to convert beziers to polygons), though it would be much more reliable than the current code in geometry/pathfinder.coffee.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsclipper/

[artursapek]

Pathfinder was the bit that I was still working on when I decided to open this project up. It's not available through the UI yet because it's so unfinished. In fact it should be on a seperate feature branch.

It's been by far the hardest part of building Mondrian. That also means it's the most interesting, so I definitely want to have a native pathfinder implementation in the codebase. I think having a pathfinder utility would be great, but it's not a top priority right now so I'm not in a hurry to get it out.

For the time being I'll check out clipper. If it's not too hard to get it to work in a way that feels "native" I'll consider merging something temporary in, but if it doesn't support beziers yet then I don't think there's much of a chance. Thanks for the suggestion.

[wraybowling]

Paper JS had similar woes but later on they merged in another boolean library's functions that were really great. It was an interesting read when it happened. I'm having a hard time finding links now, but just sayin' it's out there. Somewhere. (Also, paperjs is on github. So there's that.)—
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On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 10:01 AM, Artur Sapek [email protected]
wrote:

Pathfinder was the bit that I was still working on when I decided to open this project up. It's not available through the UI yet because it's so unfinished. In fact it should be on a seperate feature branch.
It's been by far the hardest part of building Mondrian. That also means it's the most interesting, so I definitely want to have a native pathfinder implementation in the codebase. I think having a pathfinder utility would be great, but it's not a top priority right now so I'm not in a hurry to get it out.

For the time being I'll check out clipper. If it's not too hard to get it to work in a way that feels "native" I'll consider merging something temporary in, but if it doesn't support beziers yet then I don't think there's much of a chance. Thanks for the suggestion.

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#11 (comment)

[artursapek]

I have an attack strategy for Pathfinder - I think I have the algorithm worked out on paper. I'm working on visual documentation at artur.co/pathfinder.

I just haven't finished implementing it yet because there were some problems with the implementation of the linked list that stores a path's points. I don't think it's too far off if I focus on it for a while.