Is there a way to see current coords relative to any corner of selected obj?

[dots interesting]

Affinity Designer question pertinent to scaled technical drawings (and other purposes):

 I'm trying to do a mock-up of a  garden fence extension I'm building. I've drawn fence posts to scale. I have the pen tool selected and I'm trying to initiate (via initial mouse click) a perpendicular pen line a specific distance from the top of the fence post (which I've depicted with a simple rectangle).  A green vertical highlight line shows up over the rectangle's left side when I hover over the left side of the rectangle, and a green dot appears on that line that follows the cursor as I move it up and down vertically on that line. But I don't see a way to determine the relative coordinates of that sliding dot to the upper corner of that object (or preferably any vertex or corner), which makes life harder.

 

Is there some way to easily see (in realtime), the numeric coordinates relative to an object vertex, as the cursor moves along some highlighted vector of an object?

Otherwise, I have to try to figure out how to create and calibrate rulers and guides aligned some point of reference germane to any object I want to measure. And even with that, it seems like I have to do math to determine the intra-object coordinates.

 

The app is internally keeping track of positions and calculating coordinates for numerous reasons so seems like it would be fairly trivial to add an a coordinate display to menu bar or an info pane showing precise realtime coordinates of the the aforementioned relative positions. I believe it would be of enormous benefit to alll who do technical drawings with Designer.

 

If there isn't already a feature like this, one way I can envision to do it, that would quick, intuitive and convenient for end-users, from UI perspective:  If the horizontal and vertical rulers could be 'scrolled' (like pulling out a builder's measuring tape, sort of) to move each respective ruler's zero-point (as opposed to how it is now, where the rulers' (0, 0) is permanently affixed to the left corner of the canvas).  Then, as the cursor moved, the virtual crosshair makers that track the cursor along the rulers could be quickly pre-calibrated to determine cursor's relative position to any object-in-focus (e.g. where ruler center's were aligned), without the user having doing math to figure out object-relative positions. A numeric coordinate display would show the precise values in the selected unit-of-measure.  While calibrating the ruler's 0-point, the app would highlight object sides, distances, relative positions, as it does already when moving the cursor around the page. This would make it easy to calibrate the ruler center positions to any object(s) on the page, and be a very flexible way to let users measure anything on the canvas, any way they want to..

 

There may be other ways to accomplish that already with the product (but not sure how easily). I'm pretty new to using Designer, and isn't obvious to me how to do what I want, even through searching through menus and tabbed panels.

 

[Alfred]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @dots interesting.

 

3 hours ago, dots interesting said:

I have the pen tool selected and I'm trying to initiate (via initial mouse click) a perpendicular pen line a specific distance from the top of the fence post (which I've depicted with a simple rectangle).

 

Instead of trying to draw the perpendicular line at its intended position, draw it at the top of the fence post (which is easy with snapping enabled) and then go to the Transform panel and type +=123 into the Y box to move the line down by 123 units. You would obviously need to substitute your desired specific distance for the 123 in my example.