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Create Polyline from Exploded Splines & Lines

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2013 12:52 am
by wildspidee
Another odd question. I have a drawing that includes lines and splines. I need to create polylines from various entities because I want to use the equidistant feature of a polyline.

I know you can't create a polyline from a spline, so I exploded them first. I'm using the Polylines>create from segments tool. I'm not sure what the tolerance setting should be, I was unable to find a reference to it, so I've left it at the default.

I can't pick the exploded splines at all. When I select a regular line, it includes undesirable connected lines (which it does by default, I know). I put the entities that I want to use for the poly line on their own layer (called polyline), hid my other layers and gave that a go. I crashed QCAD with that maneuver.

It's probably very simple and I'm just not getting it. I've attached a simple dxf that shows my problem.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

Re: Create Polyline from Exploded Splines & Lines

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2013 8:57 am
by andrew
Exploding a spline entity creates a polyline entity with line segments.
Exploding that polyline again results in 'loose' line entities.

In your drawing, for example the two splines that are part of the left border are already polylines.
You can see that by selecting one of them and looking at the status bar where it says "Selected entities: 1 Polyline on Layer 'polyline'."

I would now use the equidistant tool on those splines and the parallel tool on the lines. Then the corners can be trimmed. Alternatively, it is also possible to explode those polylines into lines and then create one polyline from the entire outer contour using Polyline -> Create from segments.

Re: Create Polyline from Exploded Splines & Lines

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2013 3:37 pm
by wildspidee
Now I understand what was going on. I didn't realize that an exploded spline became a polyline, I thought it became lines first. I wasn't looking at the Property Editor.

Works perfectly now, of course. Thank you for your time Andrew.