How do I alter the stroke width along a path/line?

Question

Having read the SVG2 draft, I am slightly disappointed to learn that there will be no new line caps than the standard 3. The new arc line join is brilliant however, but not what this question is about (I just wanted to mention that).

I had been hoping for a cap that ends in a triangle. But given my use case, that might not be ideal either.

As far as I can gather, Adobe Illustrator - which I do not use myself - allows the width of a stroke to be variable. This is useful when drawing from a drawing tablet, to highlight the pressure of the lines. It's true, this functionality exists in many bitmap drawing programs, but is there a way to achieve this effect in SVG, without having to draw multiple lines?

The idea is that each node should have a width, and the lines should then 'smoothly' scale the width between each node that had a different width.

Is this possible? And if not, could it be considered?

P.S. I should point out, that this is more a thought experiment and an idea than something that hinders my process. More of a nice to have than need to have.

Answer 1

While this may not be a true answer (SVG standard wise at least), it turns out that in the current trunk version of Inkscape, this feature called PowerStroke already exists. There are some screenshots of PowerStroke.

This should satisfy my quest for the time being.

It turns out - as well - that the arc line joins was actually suggested by Inkscape as well, they are just called extrapolate in Inkscape.