Getting the shortest distance between a circle and a line

Mathieu Fournier

Hi,

I would like to create the shortest line possible between a circle and a line. Is there a way to do it?

Thank you

martin@enco.us

There is a thread at theswamp.org titled "Minimum distance between two vlax-curve objects" that discusses this. 

Hans De Backer

Start the line command, type "_per", select the circle, type "_per", select the line.

Instead of entering "_per" one may prefer to click the 'Perpendicular' icon on the Entity Snaps toolbar.

Louis_Verdonck

 If you have only the Perpendicular entity snap active, start the Line command and snap to the circle, then the line or vice versa.

John Gaunt

A slow but reliable way is to draw to or from the circle centre then trim it later.

With multiple snaps set, per tends to take priority and it's sometimes not clear if it's a new point or perpendicular from the last point of a previous operation.

Mathieu Fournier

Thank you everyone for your answers.

I should of mentionned it in my previous message, but I was looking for something similar to the ' Construct Minimum Distance Line ' function in Microstation. Although snapping to the center of the circle and then doing a perpendicular seems to work fine for me.

Thanks!