Finding a Line's Length

This tip describes a couple of methods to find a line's length. It's mostly effective with straight horizontal and vertical lines, but I will show a method to find a diagonal line's length as well.

If it's one thing that FreeHand could use is the ability to show a line's length in either the Info bar/box or in the Object Inspector.

Version: Any

As you can see above, I created a simple horizontal line. Unless I paid careful attention during the drawing of the line, I have no idea how long this line is. The Object Inspector palette and the Info Toolbar don't even show me how long it is when I select the line.

While the line is still selected, I can do one simple command: Group. Once I group the line (horizontal or vertical) the Object Inspector palette now shows me that my line is 1.13" wide (or long). For vertical lines, the value would show up in the height. While the line is still grouped, I can edit it via the Object Inspector by editing it's attributes (Dimensions). When I'm finished, I just Ungroup the line and it's back to normal again.

Working with diagonal lines is a bit more tricky. If you group a diagonal line, the Object Inspector will just show how wide the over-all grouped shape is (highlighted in red above). The line would obviously be longer than this value, so this trick won't work.

To find a diagonal line's length you can simply draw a line over the top of the original line and look in the Info Toolbar for the final length (dist). Here I see that the length is 1.37". To make sure you get an accurate reading is to turn on Snap to Point in the View menu (notice cursor above). When you've found the length, make sure you Undo the drawing afterwards so you don't have duplicate lines all over the place.

Those are just a couple of ways to find a line's length. They aren't perfect and won't work in every situation. The best thing that can happen is that they add the ability to see and edit a line's length in the Object Inspector soon. If you have any other methods that work for you I'd love to hear about them. Just contact me via the Feedback page.