Best App and Way to Draw Tic Marks on Edges of Image

[RogerWehage]

I want to draw a uniformly-spaced set of tic marks along two edges of an image that may have been clipped and interpolated to a different pixel density. I would like to specify the tic mark spacing in terms of number of pixels per tic mark or something similar. Currently I have Affinity Photo and suspect that Affinity Designer would more likely be able to do something like this. Can someone please explain how this might be done and which app can do it?

I sort of answered my own question. Using Affinity Designer I drew a short horizontal line, duplicated the line at uniform intervals, selected the lot, and grouped them. I can duplicate, rotate, and stretch the group to set the line spacing to whatever I want. I can also ungroup, add or remove lines, and regroup. Maybe that's not the easiest way but it will do for now.

Edited April 19, 2019 by RogerWehage
Answered my own question.

[v_kyr]

Well there are a bunch of apps which can do this in the one or other way. Usually I would say probably the most suited and flexible for defining individual scaled tic marks and the like are plotting, graph, chart and math related software, or something individually self programmed here. So for things like Gnuplot see this older gnuplotting sample. I can also imaging that some software like Excel, Numbers, Libre Office Draw and the like would offer to do something like that more precise than APh or AD.

Personally I would probably make a custom app for that, in case I would often have to do such things repeatedly. Here is a quick 5 min tryout of drawing custom tic axes...

... which could be enhanced to load then an image to draw on instead here. And for adding some UI widgets in order to define the tic size/scale and distribution settings via a GUI.

[RogerWehage]

21 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Well there are a bunch of apps which can do this in the one or other way....

Yeah, I probably have a couple dozen of them like Inkscape, but was looking for something right in Affinity Photo. I take images of small objects using a macro lens and may clip them to smaller size. Then I will figure out approximately how many mm the resulting clipped image will be on each side. I can paste in a saved tic mark image, rotate, place, and stretch it to get the correct number of tic marks along the edge, and clip off the excess.

[v_kyr]

In APh you can set up rulers and define a grid to show up with the distance/sizes you have in mind, then you can draw and position your own tic marks on those (via snapping). Further the power/quick duplicate and transform panel (for more exact positioning) of drawn tic marks might be useful to use then.

See also:

• customizable rulers for other units and curves