Creating a circled diagram

This article is part of the Tips & Tricks series.

Installation • Usage • PDF issues • Other

A diagram in circle style, often useful for presentations. It uses combined and grouped polygons and other elements, duplicating, a lot of rotating and the Attach Text to Path function.

• Create two round shapes, one of them needs to be a bit smaller than the other. Keep a copy of the smaller circle – you'll need it later for creating the text! Put the smaller one in the middle of the bigger one and use the command Item > Combine Polygons. That way, you will get a ring. Set the stroke colour to "None" and the fill colour to whatever you like.

• Now, we build the arrows. Create a new triangular shape and use the same fill colour you applied to the ring. Set the stroke colour to white.

• Rotate the triangular, so that it points to one of the four directions we'll need

• Place the triangular at its correct position above the ring.

• To hide the triangular's white stroke above the ring on the triangular's long side, just draw a small, filled rectangular shape without the stroke's color above the triangular.

• Group the triangular and the rectangular, create three duplicates, rotate the duplicates so that they are pointinging to the four directions and place them above the ring.

• Now we add the text. Remember the copy of the small circle you made. Convert it to a bezier curve. Create a text frame with your text and use Item > Attach Text to Path. Move this text until it has its the correct position on the ring. You also have to play around with rotating until it fits perfectly.

• The text on the path is still editable – create three copies of the first text-on-path item, use the Story Editor to edit their content and move and rotate until the texts are all in the desired place above the ring.

(c) Thomas Zastrow, 2007 The content of this page is licenced under the Free Documentation Licence.