Moonlight and Roses

[Tabian]

Hi iagman, yes indeed I see what you mean Xara is lacking a few tools for precise placements and object diagonal alignment. The way round it that I came up with was to rotate counter clockwise be 12^o so that the nose was vertical, draw a rectangle from the nose to the eye for spacing purposes, clone the eye and flip horizontally. Move the rectangle to the other side of the nose and place the cloned eye to the right of the rectangle then delete the rectangle. Select the first eye, then add to the selection the second eye and align to bottom this will align the second eye to the first eye. Group all three objects and rotate 12^o clockwise. I know it sounds like a lot of mucking about but it was quite quick to do. Saying that if you are doing a technical drawing were objects must be placed precisely to within two point of a mm then I think Xara is out of the window. I seem to remember another thread where someone was having issues with obtaining precise arcs on the corners of rectangles so as far as technical precision goes Xara has limitations. There are many other programs that are more suited for this type of drawing and TurboCAD being one of them. I have only used TurboCAD once for doing a planning application and that was some years ago and for drawing site plans there is nothing better.



My best Tabian

[iagman]

To mirror the selected eye across the nose in TurboCad requires a click on the mirror tool and two snaps on the nose line to define where the mirror plane lies. The duplicate eye is then mirrored instantaneously.
This ability to draft lines quickly and with exactness is a time saver when using drafting software instead of illustration software such as Xara. Of course, scenes such as those posted in this forum seldom need engineering-type precision. But they can often benefit from exact placement of entities by snapping to commonly used points such as ends/middle/intersection of lines, or mirroring in any direction such as the slanted nose in this example.
The other side of this coin is, CAD is the pits if you try to illustrate scenes. However, Xara is the cat's meow for this; each software package has its place and that's why they can not be fairly compared.
Thanks for your help and this is why I often turn to CAD to generate the line drawings; often, but not always. The scene I have in mind now requires no line drawing in TC because it will be constructed in 3D so the computer can work out the perspectives and shadowing automatically, then a screenshot will be pasted into Xara for tracing Isn't that what computers are for, to do the complex, head-scratching stuff and leaving us more time to do the fun stuff. But I suspect the head-scratching stuff IS the fun stuff for computers.

[Tabian]

I quite agree...