Having Trouble With Radial Placement of Tiled Clones

[Kirsten]

I'm having some trouble getting the tiled clones to arrange radially, and I'm not sure why because I've been able to accomplish this without too much trouble in the past.

I've gone through several tutorials on this, but will refer to the one on the Inkscape site to show my work, and hopefully gain some insight on where I am going wrong.
Starting with a new Inkscape document, I make a simple line with the Bezier tool, and select it. These are my settings as described in the radial placement with tiled clones tutorial: (https://inkscape.org/en/doc/tutorials/tips/tutorial-tips.en.html)


Tutorial Screenshot.png
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Six Columns.png
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Shift Settings.png
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Rotation Settings.png
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Result.png
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I've tried resetting the tiled clone menu, on every tab just to be sure that the settings are cleared, but it seems there is still something pushing these clones into the wrong arrangement. Is there something in the preferences that I need to reset?

Any ideas on how to make this work right? It's seems to me that I'm missing something obvious that another set of sharp eyes will be able to spot for me.
Thanks in advance for your help!
(Inkscape Version 0.91, on a Mac Book Pro, 8GB RAM, Yosemite)

[Lazur]

Hi.

Have you  reset the rotation center of the path by any chance?
Probably it should work on a newly drawn path as expected.

[Kirsten]

Thank you for the lightning fast response!
Good point on the rotation center. I hadn't checked that and was optimistic it would work, but no ...

(In the meantime I have reset my preferences by quitting Inkscape and removing the preferences.xml file, with no change in my results. https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape/+question/205961)

The rotation center is in the center of my line:


Rotation Center.png
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And the result is a slightly different version of what I had before:


Result2.png
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[Lazur]

Then another guess.

You had resized the page to content before the tiled clones thing and the resulting global transformations interfere with the tiled clones.

Try starting without the page resize or in a current document, on a new layer.
Or check the linked extension in this topic.

[Kirsten]

Awesome! 

I used exactly the same tiled clone settings on the new layer and it worked perfectly.


Layers.png
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Result 3.png
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I'm not sure how to change the page resize though because my original layer still exhibits the same behavior as before. It would be good for me to know how to undo that as I'm sure to run into this problem again.


BothResults.png
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[Lazur]

You are welcome!

Transformations are related to the objects and document structure.
By grouping objects, you create new ones in the structure so that is an usual way for avoiding artifacts.
I'd try grouping the object, resize the page, then enter the group and tiled clone the object inside the group.

But for this drawing I personally think the whole process is overly complicated.
Select object, press Alt+D, rotate object while holding Ctrl, press Ctrl+D and rotate the duplicate of the first clone as before.
No need for typing in tables.
And what would the clones be good after? If it was only for that image I'd rather just use duplicating and combining the paths together.

To be honest I'm not using tiled clones often.

[Kirsten]

Well, I tried grouping my line and got this ... 


Result 4.png
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But I think you're right, there is a much easier way to do this! (At least in my example image.)


Result 5.png
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The bottom image was created in the same layer as the top one, and took me about fifteen seconds.

I think part of the fun in Inkscape is figuring out how to get from here to there, and not making a mess of it.

Thanks again for all your help. I'll be sure to stop by again if when I get stuck. 

[Moini]

This problem will be fixed in the next version