Gaps between lines is slightly off
Okay, I'm back with yet another question about working with the abstract style, haha.
So when creating lines to represent rail lines, sometimes they run right next to one another to show lines using the same tracks, etc. I've noticed that when the lines are created with the exact same angles right next to one another, the gap between the lines is slightly wider when they are diagonal vs. when they are straight horizontal or vertical. I've attached an image to show this.
I assume this has something to do with the way CC3 renders lines and angles, and fortunately as you can see, the disparity isn't massive. But it is there, and I thought it was worth asking: is there any way to "fix" this? To make it so that I can have lines that are angled precisely the same way and are right next to one another with a small gap between them as in the image, but with a consistent distance for the gap?
Comments
You could use the ofset tool instead.
Try drawing a thin guideline along the line of the track first that can be deleted later, or hidden on a different layer at the end of the process.
Then get the Offset tool from the Draw menu and use the default options. Pick the guideline, then set the distance between the guideline and the desired position of one of the actual lines using the keyboard and the command line prompts, and then click one side of the guideline. Repeat the process on the other side of the guideline. That way you will end up with two parallel lines that stay exactly the same distance apart.
Now that's interesting, it does seem to work. I've used offset for other purposes on other maps, but didn't realize it would be different from just creating a new line with the drawtool in this way.
The difference between the diagonal vs. straight gaps was almost nothing (the horizontal gap was 2.5, the diagonal gap was 2.7) when the second line was created with offset. I assume there's some crazy math going on as to why the additional line is rendered in a slightly different way when using offset vs. just drawing another line, haha. In any case, I should be able to use this to solve the problem. Thanks!
I wouldn't know about the maths involved, but you're probably right.
I will guess that you're drawing two lines snapped to a grid right next to each other to get your tracks? The lines will end up being farther apart for any angle other than vertical because the snap positions won't get the same distance on the angles. The attached image shows how the angles on the two line compare. The diagonal reddish lines perpendicular to the blue or green line should be on top of each other, but instead are offset because of how they hit the snap grid.
As Sue suggested, offset will work nicely here, even for curved lines.
Ahhh that makes sense (and is very interesting to boot). Thanks!
And yeah, basically what I'm going to do is draw my lines in segments. Like, if one "line" (as in an actual rail line that you can take) goes straight left, then diagonal down left, then straight down, etc... I'm not going to use the path drawtool to draw all of that as one entity. I'm going to mostly draw entities like that as multiple lines. Then, I can simply use offset on all the diagonal segments for when there are multiple lines. Between that and drawing new segments where needed and using tools like Combine Paths and Trim, etc. it should work fine this way. More steps to draw the lines, but it will result in a better map so it's worth it.