trim too

 From:  Michael Gibson
4129.4 In reply to 4129.1 
Hi Rich, also another note - in addition to Trim you can use the Boolean commands on curves, and if you've got a case where you've got several curves forming a closed shape with some excess overshoot bits on them you can use Boolean Union on that kind of a thing to trim off all the little pieces in one shot.

So for example, say you've got 4 lines set up like so:



You can select all of them like this:



And then run Construct > Boolean > Union, and that will then spit out this result:




So that's actually quicker than a "QuickTrim" would be anyway since it does it all in one go without any clicking on any little individual bits required.

But it will only work in that way if the curves make a closed region - that's what it looks for in this case to find which piece to keep and which ones to throw away. If you don't have a closed region you can still run the boolean on it but it will generate a bunch of sliced up pieces instead.

If you need to do this often you can set up a keyboard shortcut and for the command part put: BooleanUnion - then with that set you can select a set of curves as above and get them all trimmed and cleaned up and joined into a closed curve with just one keypress and no other clicking required at all.

This curve Boolean is not quite 100% reliable though, you may find some cases where it does not clean every single corner (I think there's a problem in concave areas of a shape or something like that, if your shape is convex it seems to work better...) so occasionally you may need to run Edit > Separate on the result and do some manual trimming on a couple of spots that it missed.

- Michael

EDITED: 19 Mar 2011 by MICHAEL GIBSON