[Vince]

I’ve been look at creating grids for something else then came up with this….

Create your 2’x2′ template grid in a new document covering the biggest area that you’ll need – cover an A1 piece of paper if needed. Use individual Polylines – this should only take a few minutes.

If you use group to make to copy & paste when drawing your template then make sure everything is ungrouped when you finish.

Then to use: –

1. Copy the whole template page into the document you are working on.

2. Go to the area you are wanting to measure and use “Spaces” and draw around the area that you are looking at.

3. Copy the space and paste it onto your grid instead of trying to put the grid onto your shape.

4. Move the space around to get the best fit on your grid.

5. Go to your mark-ups list and sort by spaces and then select the space that you are working on.

That should be it – 2′ long lengths that are fully captured in the space will be totalled in the mark-up list. This should be the only item within that space so the mark-up list will give you the total length of all the 2’s.

No need for cutting, stretching or deleting of the grid. You can of course make adjustments to the shape of the Space to include any additional 2′ lengths to your measures or you can move the whole shape slightly to see what difference that makes.

Still not 100% accurate but should hopefully get you near enough.

Alternatively, you can go for a slightly more ‘destructive’ route. You will need to know the total length of all the 2′ segments in your grid to start with for this one.

1. Copy the whole template page into the document you are working on.

2. Either use an area mark-up or spaces to copy the shape of the area that you want to measure.

3. Paste the shape onto your grid.

4. Use the lasso tool to trace around your shape – this will select any of the grid line that even partly fall with your area.

5. Delete the selected lines.

6. Deducted the resulting total length of gridlines from your original total to obtain the total length deleted.

This method obviously doesn’t allow for any manipulation or fine tuning though.

😃