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It is known that we could construct an ellipse (or any other conic section) using five points. I've found a plugin for Inkscape that do that construction. But I want to solve this task in Illustrator.

Is there any plugin for Adobe Illustrator that could construct an ellipse using five points?

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  • Not that i know of. But i do have a script that does this somewhere on my hard disk. Would that be an acceptable solution. Its not that i couldnt make a plugin of it but I'd rather not as its a bit painfull to setup a compiling environment that checks and tests cross platform compiles.
    – joojaa
    Jun 28, 2017 at 15:15

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Yes, there is a script.

The script is called Circle.jsx by Hiroyuki Sato

You can run the script and then just choose how many anchors you want your circle to have.

Ovalize.jsx is the new version of Circle.jsx which didn't perform the extra stuff which Ovalize does, it only created a circle by custom amount of points (which is what you want).

If you wanted to use Ovalize, you'd have to create a path first. (You can make an ellipse and then run the script and select the amount of points and it will adjust.)

You can still download Circle.jsx from their website.

The old version of Ovalize.
This script draws a circle that has specified number of anchor points at the center of the active artboard.

Just download the zip file which has lots of other useful scripts as well, Circle.jsx will be in the folder \\doc\legacy_and_extra\

If you always want to have 5 point ellipses and save a couple seconds by skipping the prompt, you can modify the line in the script from

number_of_anchors = prompt("number of anchors", number_of_anchors);

to

number_of_anchors = 5;

and then save the script as something like 5ptEllipse.jsx.

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  • OP is not asking for a circle with 5 points, but rather what conic passes the arbitrary 5 points user defines.
    – joojaa
    Dec 7, 2018 at 5:43
  • Indeed, the script does not work like the Inkscape script.
    – Ideogram
    Oct 12, 2020 at 13:01
  • The script does not draw an ellipse that pass through the given five points.
    – Ivan Z
    Mar 2, 2022 at 12:46

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