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Context snapping

When context snapping is enabled, certain feature in the objects of your current drawing become magnetic. There are three buttons to enable three different features of your objects: vertices, the boundary, and intersection points.

  When the mouse is too far away from the nearest interesting feature, the mouse position will not be "snapped". The threshold can be changed by moving the Snap distance slider in the configuration panel. If you use a high setting, you will need to toggle snapping on and off during drawing. Some people prefer to set snapping on once and for all, and to set the snap distance to a very small value like 3 or 4.

The features that you can make "magnetic" are the following:

 
vertices
are vertices of polygonal objects, control points of multiplicity three of splines, centers of circles and ellipses, centers and end points of circular arcs, and mark positions. Vertex snapping is turned on by pressing the button labeled with a period. The period looks like a point or vertex.

 

boundaries
are the object boundaries of polygonal objects, splines and splinegons, circles and ellipses, and circular arcs. Boundary snapping is enabled by pressing the /-button. Note that the / character resembles a line segment, the boundary of a polygonal object.

 

intersections
are the intersection points between edges of polygonal objects, circles, or circular arcs. Note that intersection points involving splines or ellipses are not recognized. Intersection snapping is turned on with the x-button. The letter x looks like the intersection of two lines.
  When you are creating or editing a polygonal or spline object, you sometimes want to be able to snap to the already present vertices or control points of the object you are working on. This can be achieved by pressing the button self in the Snap field. Note that this only concerns vertices (and, unlike normal vertex snapping, the control points of a spline are now magnetic as well), not the boundary curve or intersection points.

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