Precise angles
Rosemont_Line
Traveler
I'm going to start using the abstract style from the 2010 Annual (https://www.profantasy.com/annual/2010/may10.html)
to make railway/metro maps. As with most such real maps that I'm going to emulate (London Underground, S-Bahn systems in Germany, etc.), I want all of the diagonal lines to be going at the same angle (essentially a 45-degree angle). Is there a way to do precise angles in CC3+? Even with snap on, I feel like eyeballing it is going to leave me staring at some lines going "hang on, did I get that angle right", haha. So if there is a way to tell CC3+ to make a line at a certain angle as it's being drawn, that'd be perfect (and then once I have two such diagonal lines drawn at the proper angles - one going downward left and one going downward right - I can just copy them to trace further diagonal lines). Thanks!
Comments
Yes there is. You can specify the angle of a line by using keyboard inputs to position subsequent nodes following the first one.
But if all you want is 45 degrees then use the snap grid. It's a lot faster than all that typing. A line that crosses the same number of horizontal grid squares as vertical ones is always 45 degrees.
Use the Bearing angle modifier (Tools -> Snaps), or you can type the coordinates using radial coordinates using the < symbol (f.eks <45,300 where 300 is the length of the line).
Edit. Ninjaed by Sue. But just a comment about the snap grid then, that works very well if your starting point is on the snap grid, otherwise, not so helpful.
Hadn't thought about that with the snap grid, that if the same number of boxes are crossed in both dimensions, it'd be at the correct angle. Thanks Sue!
Monson, there are so many commands and functions in this software that I never knew about until seeing you post about it here in response to some question, haha. Thanks as always.
Also I've gone from rags to riches, because in addition to what the two of you posted, I think I just noticed something: in the readout in the upper left corner, below the toolbars (I forget what this field is called), one of the options not only shows the distance from the last point you clicked, but (and I totally didn't notice this before somehow) it seems to also be showing the angle. So I should be able to use that as well, to simply see what angle my upcoming line placement is at.