Ten Year Challenge - Dotted Lines

[Chris M]

Anyway I like to reply/try these questions if for no other reason but to learn new ways of doing thing.

Quite possibly the best user tip any of us will ever read.

[Acorn]

I knew I had the question wrong. LOL
Anyway I like to reply/try these questions if for no other reason but to learn new ways of doing thing.

They also make me think of a better way to put things across - still working on it.

A nice discovery I've just thought out incidentally.

In my Xara - Scatter Dot and Gapped Lines.xar, I have regular symmetrical shapes that create the line: a red dot and a gap.
Both were set as 0 degree circles with the special 0px Line width and in the brush I set them not to be rotated with the line direction.
I can therefore Name them filename=colorRoundBox" and filename="emptyRoundBox".

To what purpose?

Well a Line ends up as an image and if I use lots of lines I have lots of unnamed images.
If the line enclosed other shapes you cannot get to them in the browser so buttons would remain unclickable...

If you convert a Named Component Scatter Line made this way and then convert Line to Shape and Ungroup, you have tons of little PNGs that are all named the same and all align the same.

In getting this far, I just realised that if I use a square (Rectangle tool) with maximum curved corners and Line width of None, the end shapes become SPANs with a border-radius of, effectively, 50%.

The dots all become pure vector and for older browsers you only have two PNGs created.

The concept extends back to the Dashes: the Named Components could be Named longDash, mediumGap, shortDash and a repeated mediumGap; rotation along the path would be handled by the SPANs with a 2D-transform of rotate; older browser would have all the shapes sitting horizontally (a FAIL).

A fun exercise.

Acorn