Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

Re: Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

IanB — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:20:35 -500

I finally sussed out how to do it at 1 am this morning!

Draw the paths. In this case, the stroke was made 14 pts wide and coloured yellow.
Select Object>Convert>Stroke to Fill. The stroke (or arc) is converted to a closed path.
Select All.
Select Object>Paths>Combine. This seems to be the key step.
Select Object>Paths>Unite. The inside of the ‘triangle’ shape (which should be transparent) is filled with colour.
Click the Even/Odd button in the Fill palette. The inside of the ‘triangle’ becomes transparent.
Make the stroke 7 pts wide and colour it green.

When it comes to path operations, Canvas, Illustrator (v6) and Expression are much easier to use. For example, in all 3 programs, if you draw a ‘jailhouse window’ where the window frame and bars are oblong closed paths, all you do is draw the oblong shapes, select all, Unite them into a single shape and the ‘holes’ between the bars are automatically transparent. You don’t have to Combine the shapes prior to Uniting them, or press Even/Odd to create the transparency. In this respect, Intaglio is more complex than it needs to be.

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Re: Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

Max Roberts — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:52:41 -500

Ian,

Its real noddy stuff, just four strokes and two arcs (three green, three yellow). What I like about Intaglio is its really easy to line everything up properly, either by smartguides (horizontals and verticals) or by eye (diagonals, around 800% magnification and a couple of arrow dabs gets it perfect).

I don’t like the way that the various paths options seem to work in Intaglio (combine, unite etc.), after Canvas, they seem primitive and clunky. I’m not asking for extra features, just noting that they don’t buy me anything for my particular work, and so they may as well not be there. Of course, I might not be understanding them, not much to the manual.

Map designers are generally quite a conservative bunch, they prefer simple strokes and arcs, and avoid program specific features whenever possible. The reason for this is many years of things that look great on the screen going horribly wrong when converted to eps, makes the designers very cautious.

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Re: Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

IanB — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:57:01 -500

Max, out of interest, on the Underground map, how did you create the triangle that’s defined by Hounslow, Feltham and Whitton?

I did it by drawing 3 paths, converting the strokes to fills and combining the shapes into a single closed path with Unite. Unfortunately, the inside of the triangle was filled with colour, not transparent. The solution was to click the Even/Odd button in the Fill palette. This made the triangle transparent, but it was far from obvious.

As a further test, I drew an extra closed path between the 45 degree and horizontal paths and clicked Even/Odd. The ‘hole’ was transparent, but the triangle disappeared! After a lot of fiddling, I eventually recreated the ‘triangle’, but it was a real performance.

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Re: Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

Max Roberts — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:35:04 -500

Excellent, it seems to be a problem when I make any big scale, so that seems to be related to my problem, although sometimes copying and pasting a diagonal also result in corruption.

I was wondering whether it might be related to memory problems, as I seem to get this most with my most complicated maps, the more complicated the more errors.

I’m using 10.4.10 with a 2MB Mac Mini Intel.

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Re: Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

Nick — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:16:30 -500

FWIW, there’s a problem with the resize is currently done. Currently you’re just scaling the object over and over as you drag a handle. However when you get the size of the object down near zero then scale it back up again rounding errors can accumulate. I’m updating the way resize works to avoid this in version 3.0.

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Re: Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

ttrw — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:07:10 -500

LOL!

finally this thread is getting better! :)

Okay, fair enough, but to most, one whiff of the mention of maths and most folk are off in the opposite direction!

You know this is the one thing I really don’t like about the Intaglio list- well this list. A forum should be a place of discussion, and a place to upload images (I have literally hundreds, all done with Intaglio, some good, others not so good

A forum should be a place, Socrates would have hoped for- if he were alive today.

bset,

Tom On 3 Jul 2008, at 18:38, Alain Schremmer wrote:

OT!!! OT!!! OT!!! OT!!!

On Jul 3, 2008, at 1:10 PM, Tom Fenn wrote:

[I]t is worth reading about the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler.

As a professional mathematician, I cannot but wholeheartedly agree with you. :-))

In fact, Euler is, with Poincaré, the mathematician I most relate to. (But I had my Bourbaki moment of folly too.)

Regards —schremmer

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Re: Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

Schremmer — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:39:15 -500

OT!!! OT!!! OT!!! OT!!!

On Jul 3, 2008, at 1:10 PM, Tom Fenn wrote:

[I]t is worth reading about the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler.

As a professional mathematician, I cannot but wholeheartedly agree with you. :-))

In fact, Euler is, with Poincaré, the mathematician I most relate to. (But I had my Bourbaki moment of folly too.)

Regards

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Re: Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

Schremmer — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:35:32 -500

On Jul 3, 2008, at 12:44 PM, Tom Fenn wrote:

Well that just shows what little you actually do know, because all 2D CAD is vector based.

But this is still no way to conduct yourself to anyone (academic or non-academic) on or off list.

I’ve certainly not come across this sort of object corruption in Canvas, Illustrator, Freehand, Superpaint, or ClarisDraw.

So why not use these packages instead?

I can think of any number of reasons.

Aside from that, I think that it might be gracious of youand in the interest of allto let go. As much as I like to have the last words, occasionally even I realize that it is not necessarily a good thing.

Anyway, it seems we all agree that Intaglio is a good thing even though not perfect.

Regards

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Re: Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

ttrw — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:10:58 -500

Alain, it is worth reading about the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. Euler solved the knotty problem of the 7 bridges of Konigsberg, using topology. Beck was later known to design the London Underground Map, but many assumed his design was based on that of an electrical circuit, which I suppose was slightly up to a point (pardon the pun), but had more in common with the findings of Euler. Worth reading up on :) On 3 Jul 2008, at 17:43, Alain Schremmer wrote:

I always liked the maps of the Parisian Metro a lot better than the schematic maps of the London Underground but, alas, the RATP is inching towards the schematic.

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Re: Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

ttrw — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:45:00 -500

Well that just shows what little you actually do know, because all 2D CAD is vector based.

But this is still no way to conduct yourself to anyone (academic or non-academic) on or off list.

I’ve certainly not come across this sort of object corruption in Canvas, Illustrator, Freehand, Superpaint, or ClarisDraw.

So why not use these packages instead?

From my experience as ahem, a professional, I do not know one single piece of software that doesn’t have at least 1 bug.

On 3 Jul 2008, at 16:31, Max Roberts wrote:

EVERY map professional out there, and I really do know top professionals who do work for ATOC and TfL, uses vector packages for this task, they do not use CAD.

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Rogue Diagonals/Diagonals on Grid

Max Roberts — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:43:00 -500

I’m using Intaglio for creating schematic maps of railway networks, which means working with lots of graphics and lots of horizontal/vertical/45 degree diagonal lines. The problem I am having is that when I extend/shrink diagonals (using shift), or even copy and paste, they quite often go off true, e.g. they change to 44.5 degrees. These can be fixed, redrawn or by changing x/y dimensions in the geometry window, but I am finding myself correcting a lot of diagonals in this way. Is this a problem that other people are having.

When working with grid snap on, horizontal and vertical lines work fine, but I need also to link 45 degree diagonals to, say, horizontal lines via arcs. The grid snap takes care of the horizontal-arc connection, but the diagonal-arc connection is harder. Is there a reliable way to do this?

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