• Adobe Illustrator

  Duplicate concentric dots while keeping numbers upright

  Posted by Zack Mulvaney on September 2, 2011 at 8:49 am

  I’m trying to illustrate several concentric circles shaped with dots containing numbers, as follows:

  

  Right now, I’m creating the circle patterns by rotating copies of the shape by even degree amounts. Each circle aside from the center one is a multiple of 6. Then I divide the number of dots in that circle by 360 degrees to determine the degree to which I must space the rotation of each dot in that circle from the previous one (always using the center of the dot in the very middle as an anchor point). The problem is that I want these circles to contain numbers, the orientation of which should not be rotated. Like above, the numbers should be ‘upright.’ So, simply copying a circle containing a number and rotating multiple copies of that circle is insufficient (i’ll just end up with a bunch of rotated numbers).

  Any ideas on how to on a very large scale (maybe 100 concentric circles made of dots), create this illustration and ultimately have the numbers upright (without manually making each number upright through individual rotation)?

  Stuart Gill replied 14 years, 6 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Stuart Gill

  November 18, 2011 at 8:48 am

  Zack,

  There is a plugin I used to use which can rotate any text back to its original horizontal orientation. Not sure if it will work in CS4 or 5 though.

  Here is the link, look for rotate text. It is a free plugin.

  https://rj-graffix.com/software/plugins.html

  It might rotate on the insertion point of the text, so you will have to adjust the insertion point position and move it to the centre of the text object – vertically and horizontally.

  Hope this helps.

  Stuart

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