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 August
20 , 2000
Creating and Using Custom
Rulers
Using custom
units of measurement
Custom rulers are extremely beneficial
for architects or cartographers who need to draw things to a certain
scale. FreeHand 9 and above delivers this feature extremely well,
letting you define units of measure with nearly any measurement system.
Not only that, but it makes it extremely easy to access.
There seems to be some confusion on how
to create and use custom rulers in FreeHand 9 however. Well,
I feel for you. Try to find anything in the manual regarding this...
pretty tough considering that instead of being listed under Rulers,
it's listed under Units of Measurement -> Defining. Thankfully, custom
rulers are listed correctly in the online help system under Page Rulers
-> Edit.
Well below I hope that I can help with
some of the confusion and how to get the most out of custom rulers.
Version: 9 and above
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Above is a typical document with
the ruler measurement set at inches (seen at the bottom of the
document window).
The measurement pull-down menu at
the bottom plays an important role for this tip, as this is where
you'll find your custom ruler settings later.
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To create custom rulers or measurement
systems, go into the View menu -> Page Rulers
-> Edit...
You'll get the Edit Units dialog
shown above.
Here you can add or remove settings
with the "plus" and "minus" buttons, as well
as setup your own measurement system.
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For this example, I'm going to set
up a measurement system for working on architectural type drawings.
Since these are usually scaled using feet, I want to make
1 inch equal 2 feet.
So I name the setting so that it's
easy to distinguish and fill in the fields appropriately. It's
important to turn on the option Add as unit of measurement.
Next click the Accept button then
the Close button.
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Now back in the document, I choose
my new custom measurement from the measurement pull-down menu
like shown above.
Now you may also notice that suddenly
your rulers have changed. This is to compensate for the changes
in the measurement system. Since 1 inch equals 2 feet, the rulers
essentially doubled in size.
Don't be alarmed by this. Even though
your document will be 17 x 22 inches, it will still print on a
8.5 x 11 sheet.
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The wonderful thing about this is
now all of your objects will show at the correct scale.
For example, the square I've drawn
above shows as being 7 x 7. This is in feet, not inches.
If you change the document measurements back to inches, it would
show up as 3.5 x 3.5.
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I setup a new measurement system
where 1 inch equals 5 points. So when selected from the
pull-down menu, my square now reads five times it's original size,
17.5.
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Whenever working with custom units
of measurement, you should always create a scale key like
shown above. It's basically a 2 inch wide box with numbers set
at appropriate places to show the scale measurements.
This will aid others looking at
your work to know how big this stuff is.
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These custom rulers will not be
available for every document however. So if you want these to show up
with every new document do the following:
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Set up all of your custom rulers as
shown above in a blank document.
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Save this file as the defaults template
depending on your system below :
Now every time you create a new document,
you'll see those custom ruler measurements in the pull-down menu. 
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