Odd/Obscure Vector Arrow-line Bug? or courtesy feature :-)

[Koyaanis]

I was needing to make some precision lines for a reticle (graticule) design, and needed some of the lines to end in arrow points. But the arrow's chosen width and length needed to be 100% horizontal and vertical of the line width (not the 300% default). So there would be no "side points" above and below (or side to side) of each line end. Just a nice clean point, like that of a sharpened pencil shape. Works great, but ... later when scaling down this vector design as a vector group-layer (my purpose was meant to make a re-sizable measure-tool overlay), those little 100% arrow-ends now would show arrow-point sizes larger than 100% of the originating line, now revealing the arrow's side-points on either side. They seemed to only show up when these arrowed lines are scaled to sizes between 25-50% of their original vector sizes, in my design anyway. These were 100% size arrow points on the original 14px-width line. Scaled-down below 25% would then show a nice clean line-end.

On further checking just now, there seems to be a 3 pixel width limit to those arrow ends (understandable, but not when you need 100% arrow sizes for a scalable vector layer). I think the easiest solution would be to just turn those (100% or less than) arrow-points into rounded(?) ends instead, whenever re-scaling a line goes below 3 pixels in width.

btw: is there an option to resize many lines of all various widths by a relative number of pixels? Say I have two vector lines (or many), one of them is 3 pixels wide, another is 13 pixels wide. If I select them both, can I add on just 2 more pixels width to each, so I then have two lines of 5 pixels and 15 pixels? Would be nice. I just tried it by selecting two different lines of different widths and putting "+2 px" into the line-width box, but that don't work. It sure would simplify things when needing to make a complex design more bold or lighter but not destroy its existing relative line weights.

[greenmorpher]

Hiya Koyannis

That's an interesting idea. When you say you want to add two pixels to lines of different weights, however, you are changing the relationship between their sizes. If you want them to change *in proportion* then you need to increase/decrease their weights by a percentage. That would be a nice feature indeed.

In fact it is achievable, I would suspect. Well, I know -- because you can do it in two steps in Canvas. Canvas has a preference which allows you to either scale or not scale lines when you scale vectors. So you could achieve what you want by turning on the preference to scale lines, scaling up your illustration by, e.g. 20%, which would make the lines 20% thicker, then turning off the preference to scale lines, and scale your illustration back by 17.67% (is that right?) to get back to the original size -- but with the lines 20% thicker.

Mind you, I wouldn't want to do too much of that if the drawing had to be millimetre accurate to scale in a printout, but it does show that such things are possible.

In fact, it looks as though the whole line widths thing is confused -- at least in PL342 v.14.9. I have to say I haven't looked at it before because I've only used PL for photographs, but I find the line widths is broken anyway. I convert the measurement from pixels to points. A line shows up as 0.7 pt. Then I type in a value of 1 (pt). It changes to 4.2 pt and I get a great thick line on screen which isn't representative of either 1 or 4.2 pt in reality. Apart from the fact that I can't seem to specify a 1 pt width, what I get is a line which is a certain number of pixels wide in accordance with the fact that the document has a built-in 300 dpi rez, but while the document itself is displaying at 27.8% (full height on my screen), the line is displaying at 100%.

Go figure.

I've said it before -- a document shouldn't have a built-in resolution; it should be neutral. Layers should have resolution. Vectors shouldn't have a resolution; they should display in "real life" representation and print out at whatever resolution is available (e.g. 300 dpi on a 300 dpi printer, 1200 dpi on a 1200 dpi printer).

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press

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