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Getting dotted strokes correctly distributed on closed shapes?


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I'm having difficulties getting my dots of a dotted stroke correctly distributed/aligned, on rectangles as well as on a circle (please see screenshot).

Obviously the dots don't care a thing about sitting correctly on the corners of the rectangles as you'd most certainly like them to. How on earth can this be achieved for any given shape?

With the circle you see that the first (or may the last? or the first and the last?) two circles (marked red) are noticeably closer to each other than the other circles of the stroke – once you've noticed it, you just can't unsee it...

There really should be an algorithm or whatever that distributes the dots (as well as dashes) evenly between any two nodes – I'd really think this is what we want when we use a dotted or dashed stroke even if this means that the distances between the dots/dashes are slightly adjusted to fit any segment between two nodes. Or is there already a solution which I haven't discovered so far?

O2091105792_Bildschirmfoto2020-07-28um18_29_01.png.d06ffaa020f6c97bfa5cbdfb50648af9.png

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It’s about distribution and compromise I’m afraid. Try this… 

  1. Make a rectangle 70mm x 70mm this is just an example size.
  2. Set the stroke to 2mm
  3. Select the dashed style
  4. Set Dash: to 0-2.5-0-0

Now change the dimensions of the square to say 35 x 10 the dots will remain tidy but if you put 32 x 10 it will lose it’s neat form.

As long as the dash is divisible or can be multipled by the dimensions and stroke it should maintain form, so. an example would be...

  • Stroke 2mm, 3mm, 6mm etc
  • Dash: 0-2-0-0
  • Square dimensions 12 x 36

Have a play to see if it works for you.

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Thank you very much, but unfortunately that's close to what I was afraid of: applying more or less advanced math to calculate proper ratios of dash length (or stroke width) and gap for any given size of object isn't really cool... I'd think that's exactly what the computer (and well thought programming of applications) is for... The clever guys at Serif should have a look at this – IMHO – obvious problem. Let's hope for the best (and the next update)...

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Yes, it’s not ideal, in illustrator they have an option to adjust the dash to fit to the corners but even that isn’t optimal.

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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33 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

 the fourth dash box, which determines the spacing

That's a bit misleading. According to the manual…

The third and fourth values, when set, introduce a more complex pattern by setting a different size for alternate dashes and spaces.

That is to say, the fourth box determines the size of every other space.

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14 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

This works in practice. Too bad if it does not work in theory.

Just saying, if you're tweaking spacing, you need not use the 4th box. You can do your decimal work in the second box and not have mismatched (though probably not noticeable) spacing.

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8 minutes ago, prophet said:

Just saying, if you're tweaking spacing, you need not use the 4th box.

Agreed. If you can achieve a reasonably even result with spaces alternating between 2 and 2.154, you should be able to use the single value 2.077 (i.e. the average of the two alternate values).

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