Width and Tweak

Finding them, and one honest warning

The width slot shows the Width tool by default and carries the usual small triangle. Click it and the flyout offers Width and Tweak. Whichever you pick stays in the slot afterwards.

Tweak has a working shortcut: W. Width does not.

The Width tool's tooltip reads "Width [SHIFT+W]". That key works: Shift+W selects the Width tool, and W on its own selects Tweak, which shares the slot. For a long time the tooltip advertised Shift+W with nothing behind it, so if you tried it before and nothing happened, that was us, not your keyboard.

Width tool: thickness that changes along the stroke

The Width tool works the way Illustrator's does. It places width points along a path's centreline. Each width point has a position along the path and a half-width on each side, and the two sides are independent, so a stroke can be fat on the left and thin on the right at the same point. Rayzia resolves the whole set into a single filled outline path, which is what actually renders.

1. Drag on a path Sets the width at that point. Both sides move together, giving you a symmetric swell.
2. Alt-drag Moves one side only, for an asymmetric ribbon.
3. Click the line Adds a width point where you clicked.
4. Alt-click Deletes a width point.

Before you have picked a path, the option bar offers Profile and Caps along with those hints. Profile gives you uniform (the default), ellipse, spindle, taperStart, taperEnd and bulge, which are ready-made shapes for the whole stroke rather than something you have to draw by hand. Caps chooses round (default), butt or square ends. Once you are editing a variable-width path the bar rebuilds and adds a Reset to uniform width button.

If you would rather work from the menu, Path ▸ Make Variable Width and Path ▸ Release Variable Width do the obvious things. Neither has a shortcut.

"custom" turns up in the Profile list only when the path already carries a profile you have edited by hand. It is a status label reporting where you are, not a preset you can pick. Choosing it does nothing.

Tweak: a force brush over the document

Tweak (W) is not a width tool. It is a brush that applies a force to whatever falls under it, in the Inkscape tradition, and it has thirteen modes: Push objects, Move in/out, Move randomly, Shrink, Grow, Rotate, Duplicate/delete, Push path points, Shrink paths, Grow paths, Roughen paths, Paint colour (HSLO) and Blur.

They split into three families. The first seven move, scale and rotate whole objects, which is how you scatter a field of shapes into something that looks less machine-made. The next four deform path geometry itself, pushing anchors about or roughening an outline. Paint colour and Blur touch appearance rather than position.

Width (1 to 100, default 10) is the brush size. Force (1 to 100, default 50) is how hard each pass pushes. Fidelity (0.1 to 5, default 1) governs how finely the path modes resample what they are deforming. A pen-pressure toggle sits beside them. Paint colour mode adds four channel toggles, H, S, L and O; H, S and L are on and O is off, so opacity stays untouched until you ask for it.

Tweak rewards a light touch and several passes. Turning Force to 100 and dragging once gives you a mess. Halving it and going over the area three times gives you control, and lets you stop when it looks right.

Which one, and when

• A stroke that swells in the middle or tapers to a point, like a brush mark or a leaf vein: Width tool, or start with a Profile preset and adjust.
• One side of a stroke fatter than the other: Width tool with Alt-drag.
• A tidy row of shapes that needs to look hand-placed: Tweak in Move randomly or Rotate mode, low Force, a few passes.
• An outline that is too clean: Tweak in Roughen paths mode.

Common questions