Patterning a cutout or image a given distance over and down

[richarnaud]

Hi Everyone. So far so good with my GF Pro. One thing I want to know is the following: Say I have a
Cutout 2" Dia in top left corner of a “proofgrade board” and I want to pattern that cutout say 15 times across and 5 times down to make a total of 75 equally spaced cutouts…Can I do that in the GUI? I can do it in cad and import the file but seems like that should be an easy task in the UI…Can I do this? I know I can “copy paste” but that seems to tedious…Any help appreciated.

[marmak3261]

Welcome @richarnaud to the forum. Even with the recent additions of shapes and other goodies, copy paste is the the way to go. No way to align and distribute multiples in the GFUI. Unless there is a feature I missed being rolled out. There have been quite a few lately.

This is where the design software you choose does the heavy lifting. In Inkscape there are several ways to do it with align and distribute of multiple copies. But I prefer the tiled clone tool as demonstrated in the following post, coming into relevance again in the US in a week.

American Flag Vectors

I don’t see any free, basic designs here for US flags. So in honor of Independence Day, I am posting three designs. One that might be more appropriate to just cut/score for masking and then you can paint the flag, starting with a white surface and then painting the red stripes and blue background of the stars by removing masking strategically. [American%20Flag] Right click and save the SVG. Two other versions of this file that are set up for engraving follow in this post, just in case you don’…

[geek2nurse]

@marmak3261

No way to align and distribute multiples in the GFUI

You could use the precision placement / alignment tools, if you don’t mind a little bit of math.

[eflyguy]

Short answer is no, except manually, but posting here puts it on their radar for a possible feature.

[rbtdanforth]

@geek2nurse

use the precision placement / alignment tools,

I have been doing this a lot without even so much math as memory, and that made easier by using integers like x=6, y=4 instead of x=5.783, y=4.159.

Secondly it is less tedious if copy/paste doubles the number of copies each time such that you have 64 in 5 moves instead of 63, or a few more than 5 moves if you are not looking at powers of 2

[henryhbk]

@richarnaud

I can do it in cad

It’s so fast to do patterns in CAD I personally do it there. For me the GFUI is a quick and dirty tool to get stuff done when I don’t have time. The disadvantage of course to the precision approach everyone is talking about is unlike a CAD sketch pattern (or feature pattern) there is no linkage. Your cad package understands that any change made to the original object all the instances will reflect the change. But as folks have pointed out it is possible just painful (particularly if you made a lot of instances) - I mean you wouldn’t want to make peg-board that way… When it is a few clicks in CAD.