Decorations - Draw a straight vertical line??

[jz_007]

LV 6.1

I want to add a vertical chiselled line to my front panel. When the lines is dropped, it's at 45°, but for the life of me I can't get the ****** thing to go exactly vertical or horizontal.

Is there a trick to this?

Cheers

Joolz

[Jim_Kring]

Yes, it is a pain that the decorations are initially at 45 degree angles. You can lock the rezizing to horizontal and verticle, by holding the shift key while you drag, but this doesn't help unless the the line is already horizontal or verticle. I suggest making the like very wide/tall and then attempting to get it 'Perfect'. Then, make it narrower/shorter while holding shift down to lock the motion of the mouse.

[jz_007]

I tried this - it worked horizontally but not vertically.

The easiest thing seems to be to use a very thin rectangle...

Thanks for replying

Joolz

[VIGuy]

I just grab a resize anchor and then watch the size 'tool tip' until the x or y goes to zero. This lets me know how much 'nudge' I need to put on the mouse to get a perfect horizontal or vertical. If it keeps jumping around zero, say from -2 to 2, I know it time to clean the mouse.

[altenbach]

Sorry, I don't have a good solution except what has been mentioned, except upgrading to 7.0.

The new alignement grid makes all these (and similar) issues disappear completely. Great feature!

[Ben]

Doesn't this just drive you nuts!

Slowing down the mosue works for me, but I have to slow it WAY down.

Another aproach is to through together a quick hack like the attached VI that writes to the size property of the decoration.

Ben

[jz_007]

Thank you all for your help.

Cheers

Joolz

[antennaguy]

Actually, I had to turn OFF the alignment grid. When making a straight vertical (horizontal was ok) line, it would toggle back and forth around 0, but never let me get to zero.

A modifier that turns off the grid (like pressing the control button while dragging, or whatever) would be nice! NI? 🙂

A more laborious solution is to use a sequence of property nodes to access the attributes. The decoration references are returned in an array indexed in front-to-back order. But, at least you can control them now programmatically for more esoteric effects.