{"id":547,"date":"2008-06-10T00:58:48","date_gmt":"2008-06-09T14:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=547"},"modified":"2008-06-10T13:20:57","modified_gmt":"2008-06-10T03:20:57","slug":"drawing-circles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2008\/06\/10\/drawing-circles\/","title":{"rendered":"Drawing Circles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am doing a little nerdy happy dance.<\/p>\n<p>Most drawing tools (on Windows, at least) allow you to draw a circle with a click-and-drag mouse operation. You effectively specify the corners of a box, and it adds the biggest circle (or ellipse, in some cases) that fits into that bounding box.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve always hated that. Always.<\/p>\n<p>I typically find myself in of two scenarios: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I want the origin of the circle to be at a particular point; I also want to specify the radius. The bounding box approach is clumsy here. For example, try drawing an archery target. I want to click at the origin, and then drag out to the radius, in any direction until the circle is big enough.<\/li>\n<li>I want to have a circle surrounding some text or other object. I don&#8217;t want to specify the bounding box that the circle fits inside. I want to specify the <em>bounded<\/em> box that the circle surrounds.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Neither of these situations is served well by the standard circle-drawing operation.<\/p>\n<p>Microsoft Visio 2007 has some new shapes in the Drawing Tool Shapes template, which give me better drawing options.<\/p>\n<div class=\"aside\">I am sure other people will be able to recall other tools that did this in 1995 on Linux, or in 1985 on a Macintosh, or even just laugh that it took me this long to notice that Visio 2007 did it, but that won&#8217;t stop my happy dance.<\/div>\n<p>The standard Drawing Toolbar, still available in Visio, supports the old-school bounding box approach to circles and ellipses. The <code>Circle Ellipse<\/code> shape gives you the same control.<\/p>\n<p>There is a <code>Circle - radius<\/code> shape that lets you specify the origin and one point on the circumference. Archery targets are now trivial to draw.<\/p>\n<p>There is also a <code>Circle - diameter<\/code> shape that lets you specify two points on the opposite side of the circle. That is effectively a bounded box.<\/p>\n<p>Yay! <em>Bounce, bounce.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>That is all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft Visio 2007 has some new shapes in the Drawing Tool Shapes template, which give me better drawing options for circles.<\/p>\n<p>I am doing a little nerdy happy dance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31,25,21],"tags":[281,113,197,282],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology","category-observation","tag-drawing","tag-ui","tag-usability","tag-visio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}