![]() ![]() If you do technical illustrations or just work in isometric, you’ve probably struggled with surfaces that don’t lie on any of the isometric planes. Wrangling those oddball oblique angles just got a lot easier! It’s on sale for 1/3 off through May 2022, with annual subscriptions 1/2 off, starting as low as $5! You can download AxoTools and try it out with 1,000 trial operations. You can also do math on angles, such as “90 – 32.48” for “57.52°.” Division is done with a “/” character and multiplication with a “*” character. For example, you can enter “.25 in + 2mm” and the Extrude panel will calculate the equivalent distance in your current document ruler units (e.g., 23.6693 pt). Now you can also now do simple math operations in many of AxoTools’ panels’ fields. You’ll see the corresponding angle from your axonometric plane. AxoTools’ Measure tool can work as an axonometric protractor - just click on an anchor point, then drag between two points. Using Illustrator’s built-in Measure tool, you would measure one angle, write down the result, measure another angle, write down that result, then do the math to find the difference, and it would still only be accurate for the flattened view. You may want to measure the difference between two angles on an axonometric drawing. In the transformation panel’s two fields, you can also type “=” to toggle the value between positive and negative. To auto-enter values into the Transformation’s Move/Rotate field, just type an “a” for angle or “d” for distance as appropriate for your current operation. The double-click trick also works for the Projection panel’s X and Z axis fields and the Transformation panel’s Extrude distance field. It’s so fast and easy, it almost feels like we’re cheating! Then in the Extrude panel, double-click the Distance and Angle field labels to automatically enter the last-measured values, then simply click the Extrude button. ![]() For example, you can drag the tool along an edge of an extrude art object to measure its length and angle. In addition, many of the text fields in AxoTools panels have shortcuts to import values from that panel. ![]() These values are entered into the AxoTools Information panel as measured on your artboard in orthographic projection, as well as the three axonometric planes of your current document projection, plus the depth axis of any currently-defined auxiliary projection. Just click and drag with the Measure tool. I'll just include a big loud label in the artwork itself that it is at a specific scale, like 1" = 1' or 25% actual size, etc.Measuring and then entering distances and angles can be a lot of busywork, which AxoTools Measure tool can help streamline. ![]() If I design at scale within Illustrator I will not alter the rulers. I suspect a third party plug-in for Illustrator that monkeys around with the rulers could be prone to the same issues I see in CorelDRAW. If I need the full size artwork represented at a certain scale on a printed sketch I will copy, paste and reduce the artwork to size using a specific numerical percentage that delivers 100% accurate results. The function is just not anywhere near as reliable as creating a much bigger artwork and simply designing at full size. What I mean by "all over the place" is the artwork often doesn't blow-up to full size accurately. The end results can be all over the place when that CDR file is opened in a different version of CorelDRAW, opened in CorelDRAW on a different computer or exported to a different application. CorelDRAW allows this with its "Edit Scale" function. I really do not like applying scale percentages to rulers. You can't do squat with elaborate OpenType font character sets in Flexi. Plus Flexi is stuck clear back in the 1990's with its outdated type handling. Unfortunately Flexi does not draw with the precision level of CorelDRAW or Illustrator. That's going to leave Illustrator users stuck with using some kind of scale percentage on large designs.ĬorelDRAW has a 1800" X 1800" max art board size, but page sizes above 1000" will often bring up the pop-up message "this zoom has exceeded the boundaries of the drawing space, your window will be adjusted accordingly." Flexi can go bigger. Adobe has received a ton of user feedback regarding the art board size limits, but I don't think they're going to do anything about it anytime soon. Back before Adobe re-built Illustrator on PDF technology at the end of the 1990's (it was a purely Postscript application before) the max art board size was only around 10' X 10'. The max art board size in Illustrator is currently 227" X 227". CorelDRAW and Flexi both provide a lot more breathing room than Illustrator. 99% of the time I am making my artwork at full size. I work in scale only when I have no other choice. ![]()
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