Walls not drawing orthogonally

[Richard Morrison]

I'm not sure why this is, but I'm having a heck of time getting walls to draw exactly orthogonally. They end up with an angle of 89.97 deg., say. I'm not doing anything differently than I've done the past 19 years or so, at least I don't think so. Is there a setting, like a grid snap or a guideline, or behavior that I'm missing in the latest version? BTW, I jumped from AC17 to 19 (briefly) and have been working in AC20. What do I need to do differently?

[Dontknow]

Are you using your shift-key to keep your direction?

[Richard Morrison]

Dontknow wrote:
Are you using your shift-key to keep your direction?

I've been using guidelines since AC17, and didn't have any problems in that version. Somehow, that procedure seems to have become more finicky. I like guidelines because it avoids one-handed typing of distances.

[Anonymous]

yes this has been an issue in more recent versions.

if one element is slightly off, the following elements seem to auto orientate to that (off) one even when shift is depressed.

Usually you would pick it up, but if it is very slight it is an issue!

The only reliable way I've found to override it is to actually click on the perpendicular or parallel modifier first, then it seems to take up the new orientation.

FWIW there is a very neat label tool that has been shared that labels all non-orthogonal walls, which is very useful in this situation.

[Stress Co_]

Richard:
I know this doesn't directly speak to your issue, but does showing Tracker help?
You at least get instant feedback that angles are off.

[Richard Morrison]

rwallis wrote:
FWIW there is a very neat label tool that has been shared that labels all non-orthogonal walls, which is very useful in this situation.

Yes, I've actually been using this very helpful label by James Murray. It is telling that this problem seems to be common enough that he went to the trouble of creating a label for it!

[Richard Morrison]

Stress wrote:
Richard:
I know this doesn't directly speak to your issue, but does showing Tracker help?
You at least get instant feedback that angles are off.

I always use the tracker. But it makes me wonder whether when I take my hand off of the mouse key to type a distance and hit Enter, if the slight vibration from the keyboard jiggles the mouse enough to nudge the cursor off the guide.

[Richard Morrison]

I spent a fair amount of time playing around with this in a close-up view. I think the issue boils down to that in AC17, there was a little bit of "stickiness" that kept the cursor on the guide line, and so you could take your hand off the mouse with some assurance that the cursor wouldn't move.

Now, there seems to be ZERO stickiness and if you want something exactly on the guide line or snap guide, you HAVE to use the SHIFT key or the context menu "Lock to Guide Line/Snap Guide", which is confirmed in the documentation. I didn't realize this, so I guess the issue can be traced to "user error."

[Anonymous]

I almost always hit R (or X or Y) while holding shift to constrain before inputting the dimension so I know when I take my finger off the shift key I'm definitely locked in to the right direction. An extra keystroke, but worth it.

[NCornia]

Hi Richard,

In the Work Environment there is a setting to control how far the cursor must be from an element to snap to it. The default cursor snap range is 5 pixels. On newer high resolution displays 5 pixels can equate to a very small portion of the screen. You might try increasing the number to see if it makes a difference in your experience with the cursor snapping to the guide lines.

Options > Work Environment > Input Constraints and Guides

Best regards,
Nick