Ellipses

[jackamus]

This is an issue I touched on a long time ago.

As a technical illustrator I use ellipses almost all the time it the nature of the discipline. When deciding on what proportion of ellipse to start with in AD one simply draws an ellipse that looks OK. It is very unlikely that the illustrator will enter a height and width. The problem is that there is no way to repeat that ellipse if you have not made a note of its minor and or major axis. If there was another box in the Transform tab that told you what degree the ellipse was then it would be easy to remember and repeat.

 

By degree I mean the angle that a circle makes with the horizontal plane. e.g. a circle viewed on its edge ( a straight line) would be 0deg and when viewed full face  (a circle) would be 90deg, a circle tilted 45deg would a 45deg ellipse and so on.. As you increase either the height or width the 'new' degree box would show its angle.

 

Deciding to start with say a 35deg ellipse is much easier than trying to remember a width and height for a given proportion. The width and height boxes come into their own in specifying either major or minor axis.

I have attached a drawing which I have submitted before and think it won't do any harm to resurrect it again. 

 

I would suggest that the degree of an ellipse would simply be calculated by AD using the tangent of the minor axis divided by the major axis or the smaller size divided by the larger size size as height and width boxes would be interchangeable.

 

Since more people are now using AD than when I last mentioned this suggestion I would be most interested in how many 'Likes' it gets.

 

Ellipse proportions.afdesign

[JimGoshorn]

Would it be useful if we could have something like an eyedropper where we could click in an object and all it's data would be copied (we could specify in the tool's prefs what data to use)? Then we could just double click on the art board where we want another instance to be placed.