Test Screen Name wrote:
One thing worth noting: a path lies within the box defined by all its control points. This is obvious enough for straight lines, but it is also an interesting property of bezier curves. Curves may not fill the box, but most simple calculators of bounding box will use this property rather than track the curve.
Ah!, the wonderful world of Monsieur Beziér (*).
Just yesterday, I was writing code to determine the extrema points of my "shape" (collection of paths) and was trying to decide whether those ethereal control points should be included. I decided on the positive.
(*) Who, interestingly enough, may have been a plagiarist of sorts, set against the backdrop of the Renault v. Citroën antagonism, according to Wikipedia:
"The study of these curves was however first developed in 1959 by mathematician Paul de Casteljau"