What thickness is a 'hairline'?

I've posed this question before, many CDR levels ago, but the anomally still seems to exist even in X6.

When a line is drawn with 'hairline' thickness, CDR produces a line which has a thickness of around .075mm

This is easily verified by zooming in, especially if you draw an adjacent  line of say .001mm by comparison.  This of course presents an issue when working on fine small scale graphics, where the line has to be thinned to be visually useable.

What thickness should a hariline be then?  My feeling for what it's worth is that although a hairline needs to be visible to be useful, it should always present thinner than the thinnest line that can be drawn with a specific line weight.  A limitation to this may be that for technical reasons it cannot be represented thinner than the thinnest line available to be specified in Corel Draw (in metric, .001mm I think), but I would be surprised if this technical limitation exists anyway.

Any thoughts?

 

  • Well, u can always make default line thickness and use it every time u need to, so, basically there is no problem. As for hairlines, well... I don't think much about it since there is so many choices and possibilities that it becomes irrelevant...

    • Ofc u don't have to make it default. I was regarding to his need to often usage of that line thickness.

      U can set thickness for every separate document at your need so, in fact, there is so much possibilities that i wouldn't spend much time thinking about it.

    • Hi,

      I don't think so that there should require any default thickness of line as u said .001mm, Because u can always set line thickness in very few clicks and even it is in the whatever metric e.g. in Outline width: just enter (0.001mm or 1cm or 1in ...etc then corel will automatically convert it into the pt metric) and even outline pen property is there for advance options.

      • zigzag said:
        Any thoughts?

        The way I interpret it is that a hairline is the thinnest line that can be reproduced on a given printer for example. That said, the line width isn't actually specified and will change depending on output device.
        It appears to be around 0.076 mm in Draw though, for some reason.

        Would be interesting to hear the true definition.

        • Yes, it surely would. I think that hairline should be the smallest thickness possible. Coz, not all users use printers (ploters, cutters, laser...)

          • Ronny Axelsson said:
            It appears to be around 0.076 mm in Draw though, for some reason.

            I found this: Hair from a human head is normally between .04 and .25 millimeters, averaging normally .1.

            0.076 is within that range. So, I guess the particular strand of hair that Corel measured umpteen years ago to decide on the thickness of a hairline just happened to be from somebody with 0.076mm hair.

            This presumably happened many many years ago, so his name might possibly have been Waldo.

             

          • A hairline outline will output as a single pixel on whatever output device is used (monitor, printer, etc). There is no specific measurement for it.
             
             
            • Hi.

              Hairline width is:

              Inch: .003

              MM: 0.0762

              CM: 0.00762

              If any of these measurement are used for outline width the program will assign and recognize it as a hairline. Other uses for this specific measurement are used in pt to other units conversion and vba applications.

              ~John

              • OK, thanks for everyone's input, but I think, maybe, I'm not expressing myself well.  It's a theoretical argument and I must agree, causes no problems because there are easy work-a-rounds. 

                I think that a 'hairline' should not be treated as just another line thickness.  The concept of a hairline should not allow for having a thickness other than being enough to be represented on a monitor or printer.  i.e. currently, if I zoom in on a hairline, it grows in thickness.. why?  Similarly, if I draw a hairline 3mm in length and then in the print dialog select 'fit to page' it again prints the line with considerable thickness. 

                My point is that the there is no meaning to the phrase 'hairline' if the thickness grows at all..  i.e. no matter the zoom factor, the thickness should never alter - it should always appear as a line with minimal thickness.