Most wanted addition to Designer Pro

[pauland]

If you select a line point, you get the angle and length info.

The angle measurement does seem bizarre. I also expected 0 to be straight upwards.

[GerryI]

There are 3 sets of "point" fields in the shape editor infobar. The middle one always shows the x,y co-ordinates of the selected point. The other two (left and right) show either the x,y co-ordinate of the previous or next bezier control points (when the path segment is a curve) or the angle and length values to the previous or next points (when the segment is a line). It should be very easy to select the point you wish to measure from but there is an issue that does make it slightly more complicated. When you type in new values for angle and/or position then it actually moves the selected point rather than the next or previous one so you need to make sure that you select the point you want to move and then change the correct set of values on the infobar.

The angle field is measured from a horizontal line to the right (+ve x direction) in an anti-clockwise direction. The value is always displayed between -180 and 180. This is the standard way that angles are usually defined in any mathematical context. There is no way of changing this currently.

Gerry

[amoore]

Thanks, Gerry. Very helpful info.

[Albacore]

Sounds as if you are after a CAD programme. Having said that there is nothing wrong with your request as AI has a measurement tool although it does not work quite the way you want it to. To that end Illy has a plugin called CAdtools which does this job and more the only thing it adds $200 to the price of Illy making this programme really expensive while they are many free CAD drawing programmes around and one of the better ones is Siemens http://www.plm.automation.siemens.co...idedge/free2d/

I do all my woodwork drawings using this programme but it is only 2D but it does me. Like most CAD programmes it runs from a command box which for a little while seems strange but a fter following their vid. tutorials you will easily get the hang of it. You can bring your files into Xara for rendering to improve your overall look but it is not the place for editing the file.

[Fred vanderZee]

One addition I would really like is vector fills: I frequently draw a free-formed area, that I want to fill in with another vectordrawing. I use the Mold-tool to reshape the fill vector image, but that is quite a hassle. See example image: the 'gold' brocade.

Oh, and a portable Xara file viewer/printer. Makes life a lot easier to get stuff to the printer.
And yes, I know of pdf-exports, but my images do not come out right in a pdf-format (parts missing, some stuff is pixelized instead of vectors and such). So i am left with raster-formats like tiff, but then my files are excessively large. So large in fact, that my computer freezes...

[brianlj]

One addition I would really like is vector fills

Abso-positively!

Yes, there are workarounds, but they're kludgy at best.

Hmmm... I wonder whether having an early-version, low-footprint CorelDRAW installed might not be a reasonable solution?