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I'm trying to place small circles equaly distant along a semicircunference. Inkscape provides basic options to distribute horizontally and vertically, but can I do along a path, or in this case (if it's more easy) along a semicircunference?

3 Answers 3

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Another possibility is to use radial clones, for cloning the small objects/circles around a common center, creating a circle of objects, and then deleting half of the circle, and "uncloning" the remaining objects.

It allows you to choose exactly how many clones you want in a full circle of 360 degrees.

Here is a video that shows how to make radial clones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0I51hXCdvE

In short:

  1. change the center of rotation of the object (the small circle), to set it in the center of the big imaginary circle, around which the objects will be cloned.
  2. select your small circle, go to Edit > Clone > Create tiled clones
  3. Clone settings: 1 row, 20 columns (or however duplications you need on a full circle)
  4. In Shift tab: per row, set shiftX to -100%, per column set shiftY to -100%
  5. In Rotation tab: per column: 360 divided by 20 (or your number) = 18 degrees.
  6. Click Create

Undo and adapt settings if necessary.

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  • 1
    I had to use column shiftX = -100% and no shiftY and no row shift
    – altschuler
    Feb 28, 2017 at 20:43
  • This answer worked, with @altschuler's shift settings Nov 28, 2020 at 0:19
  • I also had to uncheck "Use saved size and position of the tile" Jan 1, 2021 at 18:58
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You can use Pattern on Path extension or the likewise named live path effect.

http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Paths-LivePathEffects-PatternAlongPath.html http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Extensions-GenerateFromPath.html#Extensions-PatternAlongPath

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The following is based on Tricks from the Inkscape Manual by Tavmjong Bah.

  1. Click the object twice to get rotation handles (or once and Shift+S).
  2. While holding Ctrl, left mouse drag the Rotation Center down.
  3. Open the Create Tiled Clones dialog (custom assigned to Ctrl+Shift+I in my keyboard preferences).
  4. On the Shift Tab, check the "Exclude tile" checkbox under the "Per column" heading.
  5. On the Rotation Tab, set "Rows, columns" to 1 x 6 and the "Per column" angle to 360° / 6 = 60° to generate 6 duplicates on a full circle.

Hit the "Create" button.

See "Use saved size and position of the tile" at DuckDuckGo for documentation on that setting.

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