One way to use arcs and other odd shapes in iWork

Jan 04, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: pbeyersdorf

I love Keynote and Pages, and find the drawing tools useful for many things I need to draw, but not all. One common problem I have is that I need to draw arcs of circles, for instance when labeling angles in a geometry diagram, which I do a lot. PowerPoint has a tool to do this, but in iWork, the only way to do this is to draw it freehand, which doesn't produce very good results for me. I have, however, found a workaround.

Use the circle tool to draw a full circle that you can trim into the arc you are interested in. Set the color, fill and line style as you want (you won't be able to change it later). Cut or copy the circle into the clipboard. Switch to Preview.app and create a new document (Command-N); a window will open up containing a PDF of what was in your clipboard (i.e. your circle). Copy this PDF to your clipboard (just hit Command-C, and it will copy the entire image) and paste it into Keynote (or Pages). You've now replaced your Keynote-created object with an identical object in PDF format.

Select the free hand drawing tool (or any of the other drawing tools) and draw an object that overlaps your circle such that the overlapping region contains just the arc you want to keep. Now select the PDF circle and your drawing and use the "Mask image with selected shape" function (Command-Shift-M), and you will be left with just the arc.

You could use the same steps to cut other standard shapes into segments as well. Hopefully this will be a helpful workaround for some of you until Apple adds more drawing tools to iWork.

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