Positioning Points At Specific Degrees Around A Circle?

[Gareth_Williams]

Hi everybody, does anybody know the best way to position points at a specified degrees on a circle or curve in Illustrator? For example if you want to place shapes around a circle evenly spaced at 30º around the edge? In this scenario there would be 12. I’ve done this by eye except for the ones at 0º, 90º, 180º, 270º which you can obviously do just with the XY coordinates.

The yellow ones are just done by eye! The centre snaps to the edge of the circle so I would just need guides for the degrees. I can’t think of anything better than just placing in an image of a protractor!

Thanks for any help,
Gareth

[Kurt Gold · Accepted solution]

As far as I understand your request, the common Rotate tool can just do that. For example, you may place one of the smaller circles at 12 o'clock, activate the Rotate tool, set the rotation reference point to the centre of the big circle, Alt click the reference point, set the desired angle in the Rotate dialog, click the Copy button and then hit Cmd/Ctrl-D as often as desired.

[Gareth_Williams]

Thanks Kurt. That absoloutely does work!

[Jacob Bugge]

Gareth,

Kurt had decided to spare you the scare that there is no such thing as a perfect circle, but if you really wish to have the shapes spaced at exactly 30º and at the same time be exactly snapped to the actual (non perfect Bezier) circle, you will have to do it in one of a few customized ways, one of them relying on a script that seems to be gone with the other scripts by 佐藤浩之 (Satō Hiroyuki).

The simplest way may be to use the Polar Grid as follows:

1) Set the size to the desired circle size with no concentric dividers and and the same number of radial dividers as the desired number of objects,

2) Select the radial divider group and scale it up (at least) a wee bit (105% or more is suitable for easy snapping),

3) Snap copies of your shape to the intersections corresponding to your snapping by eye.

To experience the scare, you can use the rotation way on a simple circle and zoom in as far as you dare on a shape at any other angle than 360º/0º, 45º, 90º, 135º, 180º, 225º, 270º, 315º.

[Ton Frederiks]

Do you mean the Ovalize script, Jacob?

This script is for turning every selected path into an oval which fits the width and the height of the path.
If the width and the height are equal, it turns into a circle.

You can specify the number of the anchor points before the script modifies the paths.

Still available here:

https://github.com/shspage/illustrator-scripts/tree/master/etc

[Jacob Bugge]

I was thinking of the Divide script, Ton, but Ovalize is more versatile, and still available as you say, so a much better and simpler choice than the Polar Grid.

[Ton Frederiks]

Divide (length).jsx also available here, Jacob:

https://shanfan.github.io/Illustrator-Scripts-Archive/

[Jacob Bugge]

Ton,

I am unable to download from the first link (shspage).

It says "To download these scripts, please use Download button to get a ZIP archive. The button is on the top page of this repository. If you use right-click on each file to save, you'll get an HTML file."

But I fail to see any such button.

Apart from all that, the script I had mind in mind was actually the good old Circle script.

However, in a way both that and Ovalize are cheating because they lead to modified rather than raw 4 point Bezier circles.

[Ton Frederiks]

Yes, you can get to the individual scripts on that page, but not the .zip file.

Confusing, but I had to go back to the Illustrator Scripts to get to the green Code button to see the Download.ZIP

[Ton Frederiks]

And the Circle script is in the first link:

https://shanfan.github.io/Illustrator-Scripts-Archive/

in the js and jsx folders

[Jacob Bugge]

Thank you very much, Ton.

I shall be able to link to these scripts again, and even more.

This was one that failed when I was trying to post it here as I had done for maybe a decade or so,

http://shspage.com/aijs/en/

Now I wonder what happened to 佐藤浩之 (Satō Hiroyuki).