To Scale Drawing
I'm using inkscape for crime scene drawing. It works great and is very easy to teach. I have tried to do to scale drawings and been unable to do so. What I'm looking for is 1 inch = 60 inch type feature. I'm fairly certain there is no easy way to do that now. I was wondering if this was a feature that might in enough demand that it maybe included in future releases? If not any ideas on a work around would be great.
On 2007-February-14 , at 18:46 , Brian Cochran wrote:
I'm using inkscape for crime scene drawing.
wow, that's not a common use case I guess! cooool.
It works great and is very easy to teach. I have tried to do to scale drawings and been unable to do so. What I'm looking for is 1 inch = 60 inch type feature. I'm fairly certain there is no easy way to do that now. I was wondering if this was a feature that might in enough demand that it maybe included in future releases? If not any ideas on a work around would be great.
If I understand you well, you want to draw things on an inkscape document which has printable dimensions (such as A3 paper for example) but still enter dimensions and see all you coordinates in real world measures (meters or inches). I don't think this is possible with inkscape currently (though it might just be a mater of writing a global scale factor in the XML document editor. knowledgeable people please step in). meanwhile, a solution would be to draw things on a sheet directly with real world measures, as if you were drawing on the ground of your crime scene! That's the beauty of scalability: Inkscape can handles drawings on a 10mx10m sheet as well as drawings on a A4 sheet. You can set up default units to be inches or meters, as well as set up corresponding units for the grid in the document properties dialog. Then when you draw a table of 60 inches width you actually draw a rectangle 60 inches wide in inkscape. The only issue is that you look at it from veeery far so you need to increase the stroke width from the usual 1pixel to something like 1cm. However this introduces some inexactitudes in the object dimensions (because the dimensions take the stroke into account... grrrr I don't know if this is mandatory in SVG specs but this is a real problem for precision drawings). If this is a problem for you indeed, you can keep your strokes 1px wide and switch to outline mode where they become visible (View > Mode > Outline). Then, when you are finished positioning objects in real world measures you can scale everything down to a printable size (beware to click the "scale stroke" button on the top toolbar if you changed your strokes to 1cm because otherwise all your object will keep their 1cm stroke when printed).
Hope that helps.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 05:46:43PM +0000, Brian Cochran wrote:
I'm using inkscape for crime scene drawing. It works great and is very easy to teach. I have tried to do to scale drawings and been unable to do so. What I'm looking for is 1 inch = 60 inch type feature. I'm fairly certain there is no easy way to do that now. I was wondering if this was a feature that might in enough demand that it maybe included in future releases? If not any ideas on a work around would be great.
I agree this is definitely a greatly needed feature. In fact I think someone else was asking for this same feature just the other day.
I've been doing woodworking drawings with Inkscape, and have tried out a few workarounds.
First, I make heavy, heavy use of the grid. I draw a rectangle that roughly approximates the maximum perimeter of the object or area I'm drawing, and size it to about the size I'd like it to be on the final printed page (i.e., if it's a room, I make it fill the page, but if I'm doing a piece of furniture I make it a quarter of the page, so I have room for front and size views, etc.) Now I open the Document Properties dialog and adjust the Spacing X and Spacing Y settings until I get a gride size where each grid unit equates to 1 inch or 1 foot. I find that a grid unit on the order of 1/100th of my principle dimension seems to work for me (remember you can always change grid settings later if you need more precision).
Next, make smart use of the Major Grid Line setting, as the base grid scale will be too small for visibility much of the time. I often set it to some multiple like 4, 5, 10, 12, or 20.
For snapping, I turn off 'Snap bounding boxes', and turn on 'Snap nodes to grid'. I also turn the snap sensitivity up fairly high, as I don't draw off-grid while the grid is turned on.
Then, the really embarrassing part - I make myself a spacer. I draw a rectangle of some convenient dimension, like 20 inches, and then use it as a quick way to measure out my dimensions. If I need to make the side of a room 146.5 inches, then I'll create 7 copies of the spacer end to end, and then zoom in at the end and manually count the last 6 or 7 inches (I don't care about sub-inch precision in the drawing).
This sounds like a lot of work (and it is), but once I've gone through it once, when I have a new drawing I can simply load up an existing drawing of similar scale and re-use it. Even better would be to make it a template by putting it into my ~/.inkscape/templates/ directory, but I haven't experimented with that much so far.
Bryce
This what I do (I always work metric)
Set landscape. Set all dimensions to mm. Enable and show grid, spacing 1mm, major lines to 10. Set a fairly aggressive nodes snap to the grid.
*ignore* page dimensions, giving an overall 1:1 drawing area of slightly over 810 x 690 mm.
If we are talking large objects then I mentally use a 10:1 scale factor giving a 10mm resolution and 8.1 x 6.9M drawing area.
I complete the drawing to this format and always keep the reference version saved like this.
For printing, I group everything, set the scaling on the toolbar to percentage then reduce both width and height by whatever factor makes a reasonable fit the the printing area, easily maintaining aspect ratio.
participants (4)
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Abrolag
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Brian Cochran
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Bryce Harrington
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jiho