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Schaeffer
Joined: 06 Feb 2008
Posts: 9
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 Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2008 1:01 pm Post subject: Precision Guides |
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I'm pretty obsessive when it comes to precision, and verifying it on-screen, which chews up a lot of time until I get a process down, which I thought I had . . . .
I like the guides feature, and i've been using it a lot. I like the option-feature to align them to angles. Today I noticed that things are slightly off, and i realized if i zoomed in as far as i could that a option-guide is slightly off the line. so if i snap to the guide or an intersection of guides, it's missing the linework. Obviously, this is way beyond construction tolerance, but it's important to know the limits of the tool.
So, my questions:
i don't recall noticing this before. has the file been compromised in some way?
Or, is the guide option-align feature just not precise? I don't see any issues with the guides in ortho mode.
Thanks in advance for any tips.
Last edited by Schaeffer on Wed Feb 06, 2008 9:02 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Alfred Scott
Joined: 15 Apr 2004
Posts: 640
Location: Richmond, VA
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| Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2008 3:13 pm Post subject: |
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Schaeffer,
Guidelines are exactly the same as normal lines in PowerCADD in terms of precision.
Alfred
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Schaeffer
Joined: 06 Feb 2008
Posts: 9
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Greg
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 219
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
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| Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2008 9:22 pm Post subject: |
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Schaeffer,
At the risk of mentioning something you are already aware of, to make the guideline snap to a non-orthogonal line, you need to hold the "option" (to make it go to the angle) as well as "S" to make it snap to the "surface" of the line.
You also should have Snap to grid turned off in the Drawing Setup.
I find that I can place a guide right on top of a line (no matter how far I zoom in to look).
Greg
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Schaeffer
Joined: 06 Feb 2008
Posts: 9
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| Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2008 10:04 pm Post subject: |
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| yep, aware of all of that, and it's only today i noticed the discrepancy. but thanks.
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Greg
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 219
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
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| Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2008 10:24 pm Post subject: |
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Actually, in playing some more with guidelines, I can replicate what Schaeffer is talking about.
I draw two crossed non-orthogonal lines.
I zoom in to the max possible.
I try to place a guideline on one of the lines by holding option and S.
The guide pops back and forth either side of the line as if it can only land on discreet points.
I also tried setting the units to the max number of decimal places with no change (as expected I guess).
At this extreme zoom would there be some limitation on where the guide can be placed?
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Schaeffer
Joined: 06 Feb 2008
Posts: 9
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| Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 9:00 am Post subject: |
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| Thanks for replicating the problem and posting the results. You did a much better job of describing the functional issue that I'm trying to highlight.
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How Goes It
Joined: 02 May 2005
Posts: 337
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| Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 12:43 pm Post subject: |
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What type of work are you guys doing?
Take a look at the amount of zoom.
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Greg
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 219
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
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| Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 1:48 pm Post subject: |
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| As Schaeffer mentioned in the first post, it is a zoom beyond what you would need in most situations, but it is curious why it is happening. If the lines can be placed in those positions, why shouldn't the guide also be able to be placed with the same accuracy at the same locations?
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Damon
Joined: 22 Sep 2004
Posts: 27
Location: Vancouver, BC
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| Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 3:20 pm Post subject: |
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I can also easily reproduce this situation, although I haven't had the 'jumping line' syndrome that Greg mentions. But the issue of accuracy is interesting, because a line really has only one dimension, that of length. It has no width, and so if a guide is snapped to a line, or one line to another, there should be zero error. Our line thicknesses, or pen sizes, are really just visual aides.
BTW this raises an characteristic of the snapping or object selection that has often annoyed me: why should I EVER have to hold down the 'S' key to invoke a surface (actually centre of line) snap. It is so odd that I can 'grab' a line by some portion of its graphic dimension. I can't think of a reason for this behavior. I would always want the actual centers of lines to line up.
I guess that when WYSIWYG lines are turned on, the program simply sees pixels, and so when WYSIWYG is turned off there is no 'edge of the line' problem. Still seems weird to me.
Sorry to hijack the topic. We now return to the thread already in progress.
Damon
iMac 2.4Ghz
Leopard
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Rob C
Joined: 14 Apr 2004
Posts: 532
Location: Southern Connecticut
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| Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 8:56 pm Post subject: |
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Check out what happens when you drag an object to the edge of the document, like the upper left corner. You can no longer drag the center of a line or point right to the edge of the printable area. There seems to be a buffer to allow for line thickness. It's not the actual line thickness, just an allowance.
_________________
Rob
www.robertcoolidge.com |
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Schaeffer
Joined: 06 Feb 2008
Posts: 9
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| Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 8:21 am Post subject: |
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The amount of zoom is ridiculously small, so i'm not worried about it from a WYSIWYG/printing perspective. For me I thought I had a complete understanding of how to draw quickly and accurately, and this problem throws that into question. Drawing lines and extending them to get intersections is much slower than throwing down guides.
It would be great if a developer or someone familiar with the fundamentals of PC would weigh in on whether:
a. this is a visual issue (it's aligned, co-linear, but just doesn't appear that way) . . . or,
b. this is a guide/precision alignment issue (it is how it appears: the guide and line are not precisely aligned).
thanks, S.
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