how to measure chord length

[tonika]

chord dimension.jpg

Hi all,
I wondered if anyone has a suggestion on how to measure chord length in autocad 2009.
I can measure arc, but the element I have to dimension is not and arc (see attached picture).
Thank you.

[nestly]

I would say the object you have shown does not have a chord, as the chord is the distance between two points on an arc. You can use the DIST command to obtain the chord of the arc segment, or the distance between the endpoints of the whole object. Similarly, you can use "Aligned dimension" to dimension the chord, or the endpoints of the whole object. To simulate the dimension you have shown, I believe you'd need to dimension the individual segments (see vid below) Or do what you've already done and add the dimension manually as MTEXT.


http://screencast.com/t/imi0YG3u

[tonika]

Thanks,
I liked the Jing communication. It is the distance between the two end points that I wanted (original spline line). I measured it with the command you provided. The align dimension measures the shortest distance between those two points. Acad couldn’t recognize arc so this was out too.

[rkent]

Pick on it and open properties?

[tonika]

Can’t really make sense out of Control points X,Y,Z. What I need is pretty simple. Let’s say that you have a shoe lace. This shoe lace has a length. It doesn’t matter what shape you create with this shoe lace it always has the same length. I want to know how to measure this length.

[rkent]

Open Properties, pick on the pline, look for the row that says Length.

[nestly]

Oh, I don't do much with splines, and apparently you can't get an overall length as with plines. Does 2009 allow you to convert splines into plines (PEDIT)?

[tonika]

Rkent,
I can see Pline Length in properties but not for Spline.

Nestly,
can't convert splines to plines.

I went around the problem and created an arc as close as posible to the original and added line and then measured. I am not 100% happy b/s the value is most likely not 100% accurate.

Thank you guys.

[nestly]

Here's some options for converting splines to plines before this feature was added to AutoCAD in 2010

http://rkmcswain.blogspot.com/2007/0...-polyline.html

[JD Mather]

If you can post the dwg file I can tell you what it measures in a modern CAD program like Autodesk Inventor.