jackamus

OK I know how to do that and I've used that many times but if the angle of those strokes were almost parallel the VP would be miles to the right and taking back to the VP would be impractical. What I am asking is given a top stroke and a bottom stroke being a small angle different, can equally spaced intermediate strokes then be drawn using Power duplication that are only long enough to fit within the work area?

Can I use Power duplication to create the 'C' strokes without having to take them back to the vanishing point? Power duplicating.afdesign

Can 'Power duplicating' be used to create a series of straight strokes that will follow back to an origin that is way off the visible illustration area? By this I mean imagine a series of lines going off to the right to meet at a perspective vanishing point that is at a distance way off to the right of the illustration area. I do have a possible way of doing it but because I do not know how Power duplicating works. I did try to search for it but got nowhere. I'll make my suggestion depending on any replies that I get.

Spot-on. That is exactly what happened now I am a lot wiser.

OK Walt. What might have been obvious to me clearly wasn't to the rest of you! The missing word was 'precise'. I assumed if you wanted change the size you would use Transform.

I did talk about changing the size! What other way could I have done it precisely?

At last a result! Thanks Paul. I just tried and it works.

Thanks guys for trying to help. All these short cuts are known to me. My problem is how do I get a shape to maintain its aspect ration around its centre if I use Transform to insert a new size?

There is something wrong with these shortcuts! Ctrl-drag dfoes not resize from centre and it can rotate as well. Shift-drag does not maintain the original shape i.e. a circle can become an ellipse. If I want to resize a circle by dragging whilst maintaining its centre, I use alt-cmd whilst dragging a corner. None of these solve my original question.

Thank you - an amazing list which I am already familiar with but how does this help me? What should I be looking for?

It would be useful that when changing the size of a QS ellipse (circle) that when it changes size it is still coincident with the original major and minor axes. At the moment before changing the size of a circle I need to place a vertical and horizontal guide positioned coincident with the centre of the circle and then changing the size. The new circle jumps to a new position and then I drag it to centre on the guides.

Hi Nathan, Thanks for raising the issue.

This appears to be an action you take when opening a new doc. Is there a way to make the Greys pallet a permanent default setting? My reason for asking this is because the bulk of my work is technical drawing and I f I need to choose a colour I use the Colour wheel. Otherwise I only need the Greys pallet.

Hi Patrick, Yes I understand all this but what does having a lifetime penalty point mean?

I couldn't find anywhere on the forum where I could post this question! I have been given a lifetime penalty point for making a politically incorrect comment regarding the way Serif have advertised V2.2. How exactly will the penalty affect me using the forum?

Thanks for the info I'll give it a try. What about Inkscape?

Somehow I believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with how guides and snapping works. It not as intuitive as I would have expected. There are too many different setting and procedures which can either switched 0n or Off or playing around with layers in order to get it to work in a particular way. I would suggest that there aren't that many AD users who know all the different ways to use AD. That is why I'm looking for a vector app that is more intuitive and meets the needs of a low level vector drawing artist. Maybe its my age but I have the same problem with Smart phones and modern car control systems. They all have far too many options, settings, choices and gears!

I would agree if snapping was reliable nut it isn't because it can't be. A guide does not know which handle you want it to snap to. If the handle was always visible at least you would see if it snapped to it or not. I believe you are only saying this because you do not want to admit the obvious - which is that it is much better and not worse to be able to see a handle when snapping a guide.

Hi Dan, Thank you for showing the guide snapping problems which I wasn't aware of! I started this thread complaining about the bounding box handles disappearing whilst trying to drag a guide to snap to them. You have really highlighted this particular problem in your various videos above. It seems that even you do not see my particular problem as being part of all the other snapping problems. Is there some thing wrong with me that I seem to be the only one who wants to snap guides to handles without the handles disappearing? Do you not think that it is a good idea for handles to always be visible when moving guides to snap to them? To me it is logical that if you want 2 things to interact together i.e.guides and handles, that both should be visible at the same time. Imagine wanting to drag an object into another group but the other group disappears whilst moving the object and then reappears when you think you have moved the object far enough and discover that it needs to move just a little more. Logic dictates that the object and the group should both be visible at the same time whilst carrying out the move.

Yes thanks the Node tool did the trick. No need to mess about with the layers panel.

How do you select, say a rectangular object, that is bounded by 4 guides without selecting the guide? At the moment I have to move one of the guides in order to select the object. What would be useful is to use another key (object selection only) whilst selecting with the mouse.

I asked this question about a week ago but had no response. Is there a way to make the 'Greys' swatch the default swatch instead of colours?

I've been using AD since it was first published and hoped that the same technical drawing features as the old PagePlus had would eventually be added but this hasn't happened. So reluctantly I will looking for another vector app that does have these features to replace AD V2.

Thanks Dan. At last someone is going to try and do something about it.

So it seems that it is not just a problem of disappearing bounding box handles but a snapping problem! Looks like I've opened a can of worms!