Can Any software do this? part 2

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi James

Yes Logo was a great program that time past by, but it has a lot of pontential and still is a great learning program for kids and adults.

[tonylondon]

"Why don't you use circles at A and B?" Well I can of course but unless I am missing something extremely basic to do that I have to use the following process

Mark baseline with points A and B on my main layer

change to a new "construction" layer

draw the circle by:
select ellipse
drag to create an ellipse
cursor to width and enter twice the radius r1
tab, enter twice the radius - I now have a circle of right radius
try to align centre of circle over baseline point A - centre isn't marked
repeat for r2 and baseline point B
change back to main layer
mark chosen intersection somehow - maybe with something like another very small circle?
change back to construction layer and select circle centred on A
change width and height again, do the same for B, change back to main layer and mark intersection again.
repeat etc........
finally delete circles.

This is far too laborious and anyway at the end of it I still only have approximations because my markers are the centres of the tiny circles which were located by judgement anyway. and can't be joined as such without another layer and more guesswork.

This time my apologies for not responding sooner. I don't want to labour a point and I'm totally out of my depth here, but would just like to comment that you could draw the circles from your designated centres by holding down the shift and ctrl keys (and the width of the circle is displayed as you do so). If you adjust the size of the circle its centre will remain at your designated location.

If you place the circles on the guides layer it ought to be possible to snap to the intersections?

Tony

[Egg Bramhill]

Here's a rough and ready Flash example. It's not 100% yet as it doesn't like angles over 90 degrees at present, but is this what you're after?
Egg

[jclements]

Egg, pretty neat.

If you could label the grid with numberic values and add an EXPORT TO WMF or AI button (any vector format that Xara can import) , then you've created the next best thing to a plugin for Xara.

John

[pauland]

John, what is this useful for?

Paul

[jclements]

If you were doing a technical illustration for example and you needed to draw a triangle accurately with specific side dimensions or according to specific angles (using Side-Angle-Side, Angle-Side-Angle, or other geometry functions, this could be a way of doing so.


Egg, I am assuming that your Flash program scripting has math functions. If so, there are probably other shapes that could be drawn in Flash too.

[pauland]

Well, it's one thing drawing them in flash, it's another getting it in the form you'd be happy with to incorporate in another illustration, for example you might want a filled triangle, a triangle with red sides, a triangle with no background, a triangle with 3pixel lines , 70 pixels high. So as far as I can see it's probably more worry than it's worth. Maybe I've still misunderstood?

[jclements]

In the attached I imported two WMF files. One without and one with a fill. The one without a fill can be give a fill in Xara (just break one of the nodes and drag it back over the other).

The point of my posting was that Xara doesn't have some tools you might need to draw certain shapes quickly, accurately, and with precision. If online utilities (or ones that you can download) can easily draw these and export them to a vector format that Xara can import, it COULD save you some time and plus give Xara some added flexibilty.

It's no different from using Dmitry's utilities at the XaraXone http://www.xaraxone.com/html/shareware.html

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Paul
I believe Steve was looking for a way to create non linear floor plans for old houses. He posed a question about how to create triangles. I was just showing him a possible solution. In this case it was just to create one simple triangle but Flash has a rapidly improving drawing api (don't know what an api is!) and if someone wished to do the background program scripting it can produce very good results. The bare data could be put in by hand, from a text file or a database and Flash will create the drawing. Outline and Fill colours, widths, alpha etc are supported.

As a quick example I've done a version where you can change the line width and outline colour here.

It's not my area of expertise in Flash, I was just a simple example of the possibilities.


John

I agree regarding the export facility. In fact I created a site a while ago with a simple childrens drawing page. The kids could select the colours, paint specific areas etc and then print it out. Unfortunately there wasn't a method for them to Save their masterpieces. At least not that I could find anyway.

Yes, the triangles are created using mathematic formula (in this case the Cosine Rule then good old right angled trig formulas) so it would be possible to create any shape, you just need the mathematics behind it.

Egg

[jclements]

Curious, could you print to a PDF printer driver?