Draw and the dotted line

[cem]

Lately I've had to do some flow charts in Draw 9, which brings up one of Draw's more irksome features. If I draw a 3 node right angle line, make it a dashed line with anarrowhead, and start dragging the end nodes to shorten or lengthen one of the legs, the dash in the corner is always an incomplete square. Also, if I play with it long enough, all of the dashes become rectangles instead of squares. The line attributes DB says the nib is still square. I finally did a blend of squares on a path to make it look right, but that took a lot of time.

Anyone had this problem or know how to work around it.
Craig

[cem]

Lately I've had to do some flow charts in Draw 9, which brings up one of Draw's more irksome features. If I draw a 3 node right angle line, make it a dashed line with anarrowhead, and start dragging the end nodes to shorten or lengthen one of the legs, the dash in the corner is always an incomplete square. Also, if I play with it long enough, all of the dashes become rectangles instead of squares. The line attributes DB says the nib is still square. I finally did a blend of squares on a path to make it look right, but that took a lot of time.

Anyone had this problem or know how to work around it.
Craig

[Peter Clifton]

Craig

Could you attach a small GIF file showing the problem you are describing, I've had a go at trying to reproduce what you mean but don't quite understand.

Thanks

Peter

[cem]

Peter,
This is what I am seeing. The dashes are not all the same shape and what the heck is that corner thing? If I convert outline to object it stays the same. Samething happens if you just draw a box and give it a dash.

[Peter Clifton]

Craig

Thanks for the image, as I've been told here in the past, it is worth a thousand words. It took me awhile, I could reproduce the weird corner square but could not reproduce the square to rectangle problem.

Until that is, I enabled the scale with object attribute on the line properties dialogue box. Once I did this it was possible to reproduce your example. I don't think I would call this a problem as it is behaving as I would expect.

If you don't enable the scale with object attribute then no matter how you alter the line the squares remain squares.

If you want to correct an existing drawing, then break the corner node, break apart the two sections and then combine them again and join the node, this destroys CorelDRAW's memory about any scaling as you have effectively created a new object.

For the corner square problem, I don't think there is an easy answer, however if you manually adjust the line width by minute amounts it is possible to move the squares so that no sqaure is present in the corner, not very user friendly but it can be done.

I also use Version 7 (as well as 9) at work and checked this problem out on that and it does the same thing so it is entirely possible that CorelDRAW has always worked this way.

Hope this answer is of some use

Peter