slanted rectangle

Whether he realizes it or not, Z is talking about an illustration program designed to allow/encourage drawing things the way an illustrator thinks: in terms of the thrust lines, axes, and construction of his illustration rather than always in terms of horizontal and vertical.

The 3-point ellipse and rectangle tools of competing programs like Draw, Designer, and Canvas are at least piecemeal provisions toward that for ordinary orthographic drawing. (Canvas's relative vs absolute Transform setting is related.) They can be leveraged to some degree in perspective and axonometric drawing. (There is much practical use for a rotated bounding box.)

Illustrator's Constrain feature is lame, because it suffers from the same debilitating implementation faux pas as SmartGuides: It is buried in general prefs (too inaccessible) and it is an app-level preference instead of a document-specific setting.

Mainstream drawing software should be much farther along by now.

JET

i was thinking more of a on-the-fly kind of input, like the 3-point rectangle tool in Corel Draw or the way you draw a rotated rectangle in autocad where you input the starting point, a secondary point that defines the angle and a 3rd point that defines width and length.

let's say i have a raster image that contains some rotated rectangles and i want to trace it. i don't really know what's the angle of their rotation, and i would just like to input it graphically

Oops, OK, you caught me.

45º for a half turn (diamond shape) not 45%.

If I correctly understand what was wanted.

Personally I'd just draw a square and rotate it 45º but if you are making a bunch of them, or want a specific size sometimes setting the angle like this works pretty good.

Until you forget to reset it back to zero.

Philip,

45% of 1 degree, a right angle, a half/full turn, or?

Actually Yes.

In

EDIT>PREFERENCES>CONSTRAIN ANGLE

set the angle to 45%.

Yes you can...

With the pen tool, click on the page for the first point (or corner), hold down the Shift key and click three more times to complete the rectangle.

The reason i said use the rulers and guides is you can then get the exact domensions you want and the exact angle of rotation.

so otherwise said - "no". :) (i can't draw directly a rotated rectangle.
thanks for answering

If, you're talking about a rectangle resting on a corner, then:

1/ Draw a rectangle and rotate it... easiest

2/ Set up your guides to form the rectangle you need - for accuracy - and then draw it as you want using the guides and rulers...

Hi! Thanks for the replys, but what i meant was if i am able to create a recangle (so all corners 90deg), that is rotated, so it doesn't sit horizontally/vertically. By "directly", i meant drawing at it's rotated position, not drawing it regulary and then rotate it.

>The easiest way is create a square and use the shear tool, just below the rotate tool on the tool bar (scale tool's fly out.

I think it's easier to draw a rectangle then use the Direct Select tool to move one side.