Alignment tools

okay weird thing is happening. i have two objects that i want to align using the alignment tools. but they are working in the opposite direction than they are supposed to work. the vertical alignment tool is aligning horizontally and the horizontal alignment tools it aligning in the vertical direction.

Has anyone else ever experienced this.

How do you mean? The tools are named “align vertical centers” and “align horizontal centers”, so it could just be confusion caused by the names.

These are the horizontal centers:
image

So aligning them moves the objects vertically:
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And these are the vertical centers:
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And aligning them moves the objects horizontally:
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Is that what you’re seeing?

I am apparently being dumb this morning. Maybe I should start drinking coffee. Sorry for the post. But while i have you is there a way to use the coordinate system to align two objects. I would like to be able to find the coordinate point of a node that isn’t an extreme (top, bottom, left or right) and align another node to that point.

There isn’t a way to do that at the moment (other than visually). It’s planned.

I just tried this out, and it seems there might be a bug, or more likely, I don’t know what I’m doing.

I made a polygon, converted it to a path, and then zoomed in on a node point. I held my mouse over the node point and then wrote down the coords in the bottom left.

Then I made a square, selected top right bubble here:
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Then I put in the coords. Theoretically that should work I think. But after I zoom in all the way back to that node, I notice they’re not 100%.

image

Upon further inspection, it looks like the grid snap distance affects the coordinates where your mouse is at. Zoomed in all the way, you have to move your mouse a good distance to get it to update the coords. Maybe this can be changed.

EDIT: Turn off grid snapping helps. MM Precision is better than Inch. Still not 100% tho.

image

Actually, let me walk that back a little - it can be done, it’s just slightly awkward. LightBurn will auto-snap new objects to nodes of an existing one, so, for example, you can create a circle exactly centered on any node.

Here are two random shapes, both with interior nodes I want to align to:
image

If I click the Circle tool, then hover over a node, you’ll see the cursor change, like this:
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While dragging, press the Ctrl key to draw the circle “Center out”:
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Once that circle is created, the center is the exact location of the node under it.

If you did that for both, then did the math to figure out their difference, you could use the equation support to apply that difference to the position of one of them in LightBurn. Not ideal, but possible.

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