befehr Posted November 15, 2014 Share Posted November 15, 2014 I work as a technical illustrator (as well as graphic designer, photographer, and technical writer). I have both a PC and a mac, but want to work full time on a mac and get out from under Microsoft and Adobe. As a technical illustrator it is very important to draw at very specific and consistent angles, and be able to create precise ellipses based on drawing angle. Illustrator and CorelDRAW make it very easy to create these ellipse by using actions and macros. There is also the ability to set smart guide to draw at specific angles. I fail to find any tools like these in AD, specifically 1) create or control constraint angles 2) smart guide 3) scale an object (like a circle to make an ellipse) by percentage, in one direction only, and 4) rotate that ellipse at a specific angle. I have been known to miss the obvious, so please tell me these if I have missed these in AD, or if they will be added sometime in the near future. BTW, Serif DRAW has a FANTASTIC tool for drawing "on-axis", great for the tech illustrator. This would be perfect for AD. One last thing, I created an image and thought I would change the colors or this object and used a layer filter (not sure what it is actually called). Sadly, when exporting to either EPS or SVG, it is converted to a bitmap. In fact, many effects such as gradient fills are converted to bitmaps when exporting to a vector-based format, which is really a show stopper for me. A way to actually created a global swatch library that can they be changed would be great too. thanks Raskolnikov 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff TonyB Posted November 16, 2014 Staff Share Posted November 16, 2014 The transform panel lets you scale by percentage and rotate by an exact angle. All of these will only let you do this post creation though. Shift while rotating will also constrain to certain angles. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
befehr Posted November 16, 2014 Author Share Posted November 16, 2014 The transform panel lets you scale by percentage and rotate by an exact angle. All of these will only let you do this post creation though. Shift while rotating will also constrain to certain angles. Thank for the reply. I don't see percentage in the Transform panel. Is there another one I should be looking at or a way to turn on "by percentage". Shift only constrains to 45 degrees. Can I set new angles in a global setting? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff TonyB Posted November 16, 2014 Staff Share Posted November 16, 2014 You have to type +=25% in the edit field. You can do all sorts of functions in the edit fields, just search the forum or have a look in the help file. Shift should give you 15 degree increments. You can't set your own angles yet but I think Ben has it on his list. Raskolnikov 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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