Challenge

Let’s wake up a bit this community with a challenge open to everyone (no prize sorry). This is a mathematical challenge to make a script, however you can also try if you don’t know scripting, just tell the steps or write the formulas.

This task is something I’ve been thinking for a lot myself, but I couldn’t get the right answer until now. This is the challenge in case you want to try, not very difficult, easy when you find the answer, but really tricky specially if you take the wrong way (and I took a lot of wrong ways 😛 )

As you probably know, you can get geometry data from items: size, scale, (skew), rotation and position.

However the position you get is the one of the top left corner of the minimum box surrounding it.

What if you want to know the center of the object?

(Note: let’s assume skewX=skewY=0 to avoid that strange parameter)

Task: Write a function with:

Input: an item (or their geometry data as said before)

Output: a vector [x,y] with the position of the center of the object.

You can use the Math functions (cos, sin, tan, acos, asin, atan, abs, sqrt, pow, … )

The video shows how it should behave in action. The cross item is the input, the circle is the output.

(About the ending part: all questions will be answered at the end of the month)

Submit your answers here in comments. You won’t win anything sorry, just the fact of solving this tricky challenge 🙂 I’ll publish my own solution when necessary, I expect to do it in one week or less. I want first to see others.

Also, keep in mind that this is really useful, it doesn’t only tell you the center, also the size of the whole item. Perhaps in the future Pierre will be able to implement the getBoundingBox in items, but from now we have this.

If you found this too easy, this is an extra variation (that I personally couldn’t resolve, so I can’t provide the right answer): modify it to work with skew too.