Weird rulers



  • If I understand correctly, web designers do prefer the top-down coordinates format (because resizing an artboard doesn't take/"glue" the objects to the top along with it), more technical (think 2D CAD) designers prefer the cartesian format for obvious reasons, and those who do freehand drawing don't care and won't complain.

    I'm curious, is the ruler origin snapping to the corner of the page or not in CDR?
    I hope it does (not that clumsy then), without having to enable their version of 'Snap to Artboards'.



  • @b77 said in Weird rulers:

    I'm curious, is the ruler origin snapping to the corner of the page or not in CDR?
    I hope it does (not that clumsy then), without having to enable their version of 'Snap to Artboards'.

    It doesn't - it sucks.



  • @b77 said in Weird rulers:

    If I understand correctly, web designers do prefer the top-down coordinates format (because resizing an artboard doesn't take/"glue" the objects to the top along with it), more technical (think 2D CAD) designers prefer the cartesian format for obvious reasons, and those who do freehand drawing don't care and won't complain.

    Some make an entire page/poster/folder/cover/whatever in a design program. I guess they prefer what is default in a DTP app and in their case cartesian makes little sense.


  • administrators

    @Ingolf The reason behind VS use of the Cartesian coordinate systems are as follows:

    • it is easier to deal with when coding (for the most part),
    • it is the coordinate system in PostScript / PDF (fundamentals to any graphics app).
    • it is the also so in MacOS/Cocoa graphics, not that important but:
    • it is the correct graphics coordinate system.

    But once the document setup "top-down" settings is changed, subsequent documents will use it.

    Having the default set to off, was to raise the users awareness that this is how VS works.



  • @VectorStyler said in Weird rulers:

    @Ingolf The reason behind VS use of the Cartesian coordinate systems are as follows:

    • it is easier to deal with when coding (for the most part),
    • it is the coordinate system in PostScript / PDF (fundamentals to any graphics app).
    • it is the also so in MacOS/Cocoa graphics, not that important but:
    • it is the correct graphics coordinate system.

    But once the document setup "top-down" settings is changed, subsequent documents will use it.

    Having the default set to off, was to raise the users awareness that this is how VS works.

    Wow this is the first I’ve heard about the Cartesian coordinate system.

    I remember in the early 2000s working as a graphic designer / illustrator / drum scanner operator for a very busy Nottingham Repro company - the only regular PC based stuff that would come through was from Serif (page plus, draw plus box layouts) that ran direct to film through an Hyphen RIP from a floppy (.PRN format?) - the other was from the bus tour company across the road that produced their catalogs twice a year, in house, in Coreldraw then sent them over to us, then one of the Mac operators would wheel out the PC from the store room - then you’d hear all kinds of foul language coming from the Mac studio - I remember Bob getting a few of us, even management, to have a look at the Coreldraw measurement system, and non of us had a clue - in the end we got the guy who layed out the catalog to come over and sort it before running to film — This was back in the days when all jobs would run direct from either Quark or Freehand, before PDF became a standard.

    You learn something new every day😜



  • @VectorStyler said in Weird rulers:

    @Ingolf The reason behind VS use of the Cartesian coordinate systems are as follows:

    • it is easier to deal with when coding (for the most part),
    • it is the coordinate system in PostScript / PDF (fundamentals to any graphics app).
    • it is the also so in MacOS/Cocoa graphics, not that important but:
    • it is the correct graphics coordinate system.

    But once the document setup "top-down" settings is changed, subsequent documents will use it.

    Having the default set to off, was to raise the users awareness that this is how VS works.

    You all know exactly what I'm going to answer here, so I'll spend my time on something else.



  • @VectorStyler

    Aren't we really just missing that in VS you can do as in Illustrator, CorelDRAW and even Affinity, which also offers the possibility to adjust like this (I didn't know you could until now):

    Now that the big or popular apps work like this, I guess you can reasonably expect they'll try the same in VS. And so I still think that the most used (cart or not) should be the default 🙂

    Illustrator CC + InDesign CC
    alt text

    Affinity Designer + Publisher
    alt text

    CorelDRAW
    alt text


  • administrators

    @Ingolf This should be possible in VS by Option+Press and drag from the ruler corner. But it will not change the direction, only the location of the origin.



  • @VectorStyler said in Weird rulers:

    @Ingolf This should be possible in VS by Option+Press and drag from the ruler corner. But it will not change the direction, only the location of the origin.

    I think it should change the direction — anybody who moves the ruler origin to the top left corner needs top-down coordinates.

    And snap to the artboard corner. 🙂

    Other than that, I just downloaded the trial of CDR 2021 (a major vector graphics app, no doubt) and cartesian coordinates are the default. (Which I don't mind at all, btw).
    But as can be seen in @Ingolf's quick video, when you drag the ruler origin to the top left, it switches nicely to top-down coordinates.



  • @VectorStyler Ah.

    BTW, it says Option in the tooltip in Windows 🙂


  • administrators

    @Ingolf said in Weird rulers:

    BTW, it says Option in the tooltip in Windows

    I will try to fix that. The problem is that it is configurable.



  • @VectorStyler An elegant solution could be to integrate this choice invisibly into a Start Window, where if the user chooses a web size artboard/preset document (say, 960x1600px), it creates it with top-down coordinates.