On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 11:06:28AM -0700, Paul Hirose wrote:
I'm having trouble drawing a path depicting a vessel's movements. For example, from some starting point, go 123 miles on course 091??, thence 73 miles on course 346??, etc.
Drawing any single leg of the trip is no problem. I can make a straight line of a given length, then rotate it to the correct orientation. However, creating these legs individually and placing them end to end gives the diagram a klugey look. The corners don't have the perfect appearance of a path created by successive clicks with the pen tool.
I can get the diagram just right by first roughing out the path by eye, then using the Inkscape XML edit feature to modify the node coordinates. To get the correct numbers I perform vector math on a calculator. This is laborious and blunder-prone. Is there a better way?
Hmm, I'm having a little trouble picturing what you're striving to get, although it sounds pretty cool. :-) Could you post a screenshot or two showing what you've got, and what you'd like to get? Maybe there's an easy way to achieve it.
Keep in mind that Inkscape's technical drawing capabilities are a bit limited, so things like scaling, chamfers/rounding, etc. aren't available. However, there are usually some alternate tricks for getting similar results without too much difficulty.
Also, I suspect you may be able to improve your workflow considerably if by creating an extension program, if you know a scripting language like python or perl. If you need to draw these ship paths often, this could be well worth the time required.
Bryce