Computing Mitered Offset Curves Based on Straight Skeletons

We study the practical computation of mitered and beveled offset curves of planar straight-line graphs (PSLGs), i.e., of arbitrary collections of straight-line segments in the plane that do not intersect except possibly at common end points. The line segments can, but need not, form polygons. Similar to Voronoi-based offsetting, we propose to compute a straight skeleton of the input PSLG as a preprocessing step for mitered offsetting. For this purpose, we extend and adapt Aichholzer and Aurenhammer’s triangulationbased straight-skeleton algorithm to make it process real-world data on a conventional finite-precision arithmetic. We implemented this extended algorithm in C and use our implementation for extensive experiments. All tests demonstrate the practical suitability of using straight skeletons for the offsetting of complex PSLGs. Our main practical contribution is strong experimental evidence that mitered offsets of PSLGs with 100 000 segments can be computed in about ten milliseconds on a standard PC once the straight skeleton is available and that our implementation clearly is the fastest code for mitered offsetting even if the computational costs of the straight-skeleton computation are included in the timings.