Hi Pilou - it looks like you answered the question yourself!

Yes - the align command can be made to work in a specific direction by using the View > Cplane command to set the cplane to the orientation that you want.

So that provides a method to make that happen, without needing a special extra menu command.

It tends to be a good thing to reduce the number of commands in the menu, because pretty soon having some hundreds of items in menus tends to make things cluttered and more difficult to use.

I have thought before about maybe having some option in Align to take on the orientation of a line that you are snapping on to though, although possibly only if you are aligning a set of points and not entire objects.

- Michael

yes when you want align some points of a curve

thinking also to an "inclined" Edit Frame
but one more time CPlane Resovle this case :)

Hi Pilou,

> yes when you want align some points of a curve

Yeah for aligning full objects it won't quite work because for entire objects the various options for top / bottom / horizontal center / vertical center / etc require a full 2D coordinate system (both a horizontal and vertical direction defined) in order to make sense, and just snapping on to a single line would not really well define a full 2D coordinate system, like for example would that line be the x axis of the coordinate system or the y axis of it?

But when aligning only a set of control points it could be possible to make the options different than when aligning full objects, something more like Horizontal / Vertical / Closest point.


> thinking also to an "inclined" Edit Frame
> but one more time CPlane Resovle this case :)

Yes, setting the cplane controls the orientation of the edit frame.

Basically if you want to work at a particular angle instead of the default world axis directions then setting the cplane to that angle will have an impact on numerous commands, including even typing in coordinates.

In general that's an important method for keeping the UI uncluttered - having one option like setting the CPlane that when set adjusts how many other commands operate, instead of for example having a large number of special sub-commands.

Having tools work in combination with one another like that tends to help keep the UI streamlined.

- Michael