Measurement accuracy

[inger lovli]

Hello, I hope someone will help me with this annoying problem.

When I create an object, e.g a triangle and I set the sides to be exactly 50 x 30 milimeters, and then rotate the object, the measurements change, for instance from W 50 mm to 44,932 mm and from H 30 to 37,926 mm. How to avoid this?

Also, I would like to be able to control the measurements of all the sides of an object, not just width and height. For instance, I want a triangle to have three different sides by inserting the digits. Is this possible?

[Ton Frederiks]

If you use the Polygon tool with 3 sides, you can change the sides to any size in the Polygon properties part of the Transform panel.

As far as I know you can only change the sides separately by grabbing a corner point and using rotated lines of the desired size as guides with Smart Guides turned on.

[inger lovli]

Thank you for your answer. I use the polygon tool to create triangles, but can't find the options to change the various sides. here is a screenshot

[Ton Frederiks]

In your screenshot you can see the polygon properties in the transform panel. On the lower left you see the side (they are all the same).

[Jacob Bugge]

Inger,

As I (mis)understand it, you may be happier if you create the object as a live shape, see link below, then take it from there.

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/live-shapes.html

In the example, you can start by creating a live Polygon with 3 sides:

You can insert 50/1.5 mm as the radius, thereby letting Illy (job description Adobe Illustrator) perform the calculation for you, and she does it with full accuracy (better than 33.3333 mm) to get the 50 mm as the height.

Or you can insert 30/1.5 mm (which is exactly 20 mm) as the radius to get the 30 mm as the height.

With non live shapes you will see the W and H values of the rotated Bounding Box.