Flattening Quadratic Béziers

So, the problem was to flatten the Beziers. I thought this would be a trivial thing. After all, just sampling the t parameter densely gets you somewhere, and with numerical integration, you can sample at uniform arc length intervals, which is just about what I needed anyway.

Thankfully, Inkscape has this feature as a plug-in: Extensions -> Modify Path -> Add Nodes.. -> By Max Seg. Length (1.0), if anyone is looking (after which you can apply "Straighten Segments" and live happily ever after).

But then I realized that flattening a Bezier by specifying the bound on how much the flattened polyline can deviate from the curve is nontrivial, as is doing the subdivision in an efficient manner. I didn't need this, but wondered about it. And now this article pops up as a manifestation of the Baader-Meinhof effect.

That aside, writing your own Bezier editor is a fun little project that I can highly recommend. If you don't care about it being perfect, rendering a Bezier is as simple as taking weighted averages, repeatedly. And if your curvature doesn't get crazy, it will look as good as anything else.