OddThinking

I am doing a little nerdy happy dance.

Most drawing tools (on Windows, at least) allow you to draw a circle with a click-and-drag mouse operation. You effectively specify the corners of a box, and it adds the biggest circle (or ellipse, in some cases) that fits into that bounding box.

I’ve always hated that. Always.

I typically find myself in of two scenarios:

• I want the origin of the circle to be at a particular point; I also want to specify the radius. The bounding box approach is clumsy here. For example, try drawing an archery target. I want to click at the origin, and then drag out to the radius, in any direction until the circle is big enough.
• I want to have a circle surrounding some text or other object. I don’t want to specify the bounding box that the circle fits inside. I want to specify the bounded box that the circle surrounds.

Neither of these situations is served well by the standard circle-drawing operation.

Microsoft Visio 2007 has some new shapes in the Drawing Tool Shapes template, which give me better drawing options.

The standard Drawing Toolbar, still available in Visio, supports the old-school bounding box approach to circles and ellipses. The Circle Ellipse shape gives you the same control.

There is a Circle - radius shape that lets you specify the origin and one point on the circumference. Archery targets are now trivial to draw.

There is also a Circle - diameter shape that lets you specify two points on the opposite side of the circle. That is effectively a bounded box.

Yay! Bounce, bounce.

That is all.