Rulers & Scales

[Koyaanis]

I've been trying to make a little conversion scale to print up to put on the side of a hand-held wind-meter. With scales of MPH, Ft./S, Knots, KM/H, M/S, etc.

The little scale/ruler tool in PhotoLine is nice, but it's so rudimentary that I can't do things like set how often the lines should be numbered, how many tic-marks should be between each major unit, etc. If I set up a MPH scale of 0-60, it is marked off every 2 MPH, another scale set to the same size but with 27 divisions (M/S) might have them marked off every 0.2 units of measure. This is most infuriating trying to get any scales and units of measure that are useful next to each other.

Gerhard has made it clear in the past that he doesn't want to invest any more time on this universally useful tool to make it any more functional. So does anyone know of a plugin or other software which will allow you to create scales of your choice and also allow you to choose how many units of measure, minor-subdivisions, etc.?

Info regarding this would be MOST appreciated. I've wasted more time trying to do this with software than I could have done with drafting tools by hand already.

Or better yet, is there any OTHER graphic editing software that has this capability already built in? Seems to me this feature would be needed for any cartographers, building designers, ... practically ANYONE needing to do technical drawings. It must be available since day-1 in most other advanced software. No?

[Stefan_E]

Hi Koyaanis,

I'd probably use Excel to make the scales (create a y-axis, make all other graph elements white), cut-n-paste into PowerPoint (or PL) and scale the various axis to have the same length. Using a newer version of Excel, you probably also get graphically satisfying results much faster than with PL.

Stefan

PS: Gerhard made it clear in the German forums, that he is likely not going to tolerate references to other programs on the forum, so please read quickly!

[Koyaanis]

Thanks. I looked into that, and it's still quite limited in making useful rulers. But it's better than what's in PhotoLine. However, I did more searching on the net and saw a post about Danny's Draw Power Tools macros for OpenOffice Draw. Just from the description alone it looks like it does far more than the vector drawing tool-set in PhotoLine. I'll give that a shot and see how it goes. Freeware to the rescue again.

[Koyaanis]

I just found another nice little ruler making utility, also freeware, removed

But it outputs the data in a CNC machinist's .DIN file format. PhotoLine refuses to read it. Ah well, between some of this stuff I should be a able to make rulers in the future. 5 days into this and I still don't have a little windspeed conversion scale to show for it.