Drafting Aids: Ortho, Polar, Grid, and the Sketch Status Bar

Along the bottom of the window sits a row of controls that shape how the cursor behaves while you draw. They're easy to miss, and two of them — Ortho and Polar — are the drafting modes most likely to save you constraint work later.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure that:

• You've completed Drawing Basic Shapes and are inside an active sketch.

The Status Bar

Reading left to right, the status bar carries a guidance message for the active tool, the cursor's X and Y position with its units, the drawing scale, the DOF readout, and four toggles:

Ortho — Right Angles Only

Shortcut: F8

With Ortho on, the rubber band from your last point locks to the nearest of 0°, 90°, 180° or 270°. Move the cursor anywhere and the line follows the closest of those four directions.

This is the fastest way to draw a rectilinear outline: every segment comes out exactly horizontal or vertical, so you don't have to clean up near-misses afterward.

Press F8 again to switch it off. It's a toggle, and it replaces Polar if Polar was on — the two are mutually exclusive.

Note: Ortho and Auto H/V are different things

Auto H/V looks at a segment you've already drawn and adds a Horizontal or Vertical constraint if it's close enough. Ortho restricts the cursor while you draw, so the segment is axis-aligned in the first place.

They work well together — Ortho gets the geometry right, Auto H/V records that intent as a constraint so it survives later edits. Neither one implies the other.

Polar — Fixed Angle Increments

Shortcut: F10

Polar snaps the rubber band to multiples of 15°. Your line can land on 0°, 15°, 30°, 45° and so on, but nothing between.

Note: the increment is fixed in this build

15° is the only increment Pingendum 2D offers. There is no control for changing it — the Polar button is a plain on/off toggle, and unlike Grid it has no right-click menu.

15° divides evenly into 30°, 45°, 60° and 90°, so it already covers most drafting angles. For one that it doesn't reach — a 22.5° mitre, say — draw the segment roughly and apply an Angle dimension afterwards (The Complete Constraint Toolkit). The constraint pins the angle exactly and, unlike a cursor snap, survives later edits.

Note: Polar restricts the cursor, it doesn't describe the numbers

The Polar toggle only controls where the cursor may land. It has no effect on the numeric fields beside the cursor, which always offer whatever the active tool works in — L and Aabs for a line segment, W and H for a rectangle. Those fields stay available whether Polar is on or off, and typing into one overrides the snap for that value.

Polar is what you want for anything angular and regular — a hexagonal boss, a 30° chamfer line, spokes around a hub. Every segment lands on a clean multiple of 15°.

Getting the View Back

The view looks straight down at the drawing. Pan and zoom move it around; there is no rotation to worry about, so a circle never draws as an ellipse.

When panning and zooming have left you somewhere you didn't intend, F fits the whole drawing to the window, Shift+F fits just the selection, and 2 returns to the plan view.

Grid and Snap Settings

Right-clicking the Grid toggle opens Sketch Grid and Snap, which controls both the visible grid and the snapping behaviour:

Settings apply to the current tab, falling back to a global default for new documents.

Tip

Adaptive display and Match displayed grid spacing are independent switches. Adaptive display with matching turned off is a useful pairing — the grid stays readable at every zoom while the snap step stays a round number you can reason about.

Nudging With the Arrow Keys

Select any geometry and the arrow keys move it by the Arrow-key nudge distance above — left/right along the sketch's horizontal axis, up/down along its vertical.

Useful for the last small correction when dragging overshoots. The sketch re-solves after each nudge, so constraints still hold; fully constrained geometry won't move.

Note

The arrow keys are consumed by the sketch even when nothing is selected, so they never pan the view mid-sketch. If a press seems to do nothing, check that something is selected.

Next Steps

You now know how to:

• Lock the cursor to right angles with Ortho, or to 15° increments with Polar
• Reach an angle Polar doesn't cover, using an Angle dimension instead
• Refit the view with F, Shift+F and 2
• Configure grid spacing, snap increment, nudge distance, and axis/origin capture
• Nudge a selection precisely with the arrow keys

Next: Snapping While You Draw