Inkscape Path Effect: Ruler

As a maker I’ve often ended up making rulers and scaled items. If you have access to some kind of laser cutter/CNC router or even just a regular document printer, you can create all manner of measuring and metrology tools! Inkscape can make this process incredibly straightforward with it’s Ruler path effect.

It is a pretty straightforward path effect. In a new project click the Pen tool then hold the control key and left click on the canvas and drag to create a horizontal line. Set the stroke width to something reasonably thin like 0.2mm and set the length of the line to something easily divisible. We opted for 100mm.

With the line selected click “Path – Path Effects” to open the Path Effects dialogue tab on the right hand side. In the path effects drop down menu search for “Ruler” and then select it to open the ruler dialogue. This will apply the ruler effect to our line and you will see some ruler markings appear spread along the line. They probably aren’t spaced correctly so we will edit the ruler dialogue variables to create the effect we want. Let’s aim for a mark every 1mm with a longer major mark every 10 marks so we get a 10cm ruler with mm and cm marked.

First change the “Unit:” drop down selection to mm then set the “Mark distance:” value to 1. You should now see that the ruler markings change to be equally spread at 1mm distances along our original line. Next you can set your “Major length:” and “Minor length:” variable so that you have longer and shorter ruler lines, finally set the “Major steps:” value to 10. You should now see your longer “Major length” lines now appear every 10mm marking every centimetre.

Of course, you aren’t limited to creating rulers that are marked every mm. You can use this versatile path effect to make all manner of scales and rules. In the header image you can see it’s been used to make some “roamer” tools which are used in map reading and navigation. The ruler path effect has been used to make marks where every 4mm represents 100 meters for the 1:25000 scale roamer which is a common hill walkers map scale. Note that the actual ruler marks in the corners of the roamer designs have been edited so they don’t cross over each other. This has been achieved by selecting the entire path effect ruler and clicking “Path – Object to path” this means that then every mark of the ruler can be edited using the “Node Tool” furthering the use of this great path effect!