Circular arranging shapes

Grids are all well and good, but what about a circle? That may seem like an odd pattern to arrange most of the time, but say you want to make a clock graphic or watch face. You need to arrange not only the numbers in a circle, but also all the hour, minute, and maybe even second markers. That’s a lot of arranging!

So, let’s pop over to the Circular tab in our Align and Distribute dialog. Starting with a circle and 12 dashes for hour markers, as shown in Figure 4.18, we can set Anchor Point to Objects’ bounding boxes and select the top center green dot (the default is the center). This will fix the top of each line to the circle:

Figure 4.18 – An illustration of a circular arrangement

The Arrange on: options don’t matter here since we only have one circle, but say we want to arrange a bunch of small circles on our large circle. These options help Inkscape decide which of the circles to arrange...