I’ve noticed that hatches don’t support round cap linetype, do they? If not, I would like to express a great wish for the implementation of round cap linetype for hatches.
According to another post, it is not possible to export dot from points .pat files (Dot hatch not printing right). Implementing the ability to have round cap would offer an alternative to this.
.pat hatches are already very poor compared with more recent hatch methods such as Vectorworks, VectorStyler, Inkscape or Illustrator, which can include curves, fills and different colours. This small adjustment would already make up for quite a few weaknesses and simplify hatches a little in Rhino.
Attached is a rhino file with the difficulties currently encountered with square cap and what this would solve with round cap (exploded hatch): HatchCap.3dm (2.8 MB)
Looking at the Vectorworks link that you provided, it seems that the solution is the other way around. With two fixes of the current system in Rhino, the way to make circular segments would be as they do in Vectorworks.
RH-86281 Print: Vector Outputs Square Hatch Points, Not Round
(Note that Steve put this on the 8.x list)
RH-84175 Section Hatch: Pattern from Linetype Width
Thanks, but what about round cap?
There is two different kind of .pat hatches
.pat Made with points
.pat Made with lines
This is already working for .pat Made with lines, it’s just .pat Made with dots that fail to be at the right Linetype Width. (See rhino file). At least for simple hatch, in RH-84175 it’s maybe different, a section tool is involved.
Round cap for hatches should be implemented anyway.
Best,
(The Vectorworks link is misleading, so I’m deleting it.)
All right, then. Thanks for the clarification. So it’s Rhino that interprets a line of 0 length and a line of 0.001 length differently.
No, I don’t want to wait 10 years ;–) I’m happy if a solution is made to print round dots in vector PDF soon. We have hundreds of hatches to export for offset printing the following month.
Sorry maybe for the confusion:
So to sum up, there’s the difficulty of printing vectorial round dots from hatches (The other topic), and the desire for hatches to support round cap lintetypes (This topic).
In relation to this second point. I think the Rhino file above pretty well sums up the added value that implementing round cap ending in hatches can bring.
Software such as WVX, is based on a round cap linetype for the hatches, as it creates fewer odd distortions depending on the print width, as shown in the graph below. Polygonal shapes are thus clean, with no holes in the corners.
It’s true that this type of option becomes even more meaningful as soon as it’s possible to have different hatch line thicknesses. Before that, you can’t really see the problems.
Here’s another example of how difficult it is to manage hatches with a square cap linetype and different line thicknesses.
These must be circles, not flowers or lines starting from a center. It’s easy to see how round cap linetypes in hatches can avoid these distortions (see exemple with exploded hatch with a rounded linetype).
You are working with the legacy PrintDisplay. That is something else.
Can you post the .pat files for those?
I see this when printing to raster PDF but that is fine - with rounded ends - when printing to vector PDF → RH-86513 Print: Raster Outputs Hairy Circle Hatches, Not Round
