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Reverse Direction (command)Flip which way the selected objects run. Nothing moves.
Menu: Edit > Reverse Direction | Node: Reverse Direction | In depth: Show Curve Direction
Select whatever you want turned round and run it. One undo step covers the lot.
Reversing changes no shape. The same geometry is simply traveled the other way, so the drawing looks identical before and after. Turn on Show Curve Direction if you want to watch it happen.
It is not decoration. Three things read it:
- Offset uses it to tell one side of a curve from the other, so which side an offset falls on follows which way the curve runs.
- Weave reads it the same way when working out an over and under.
- A segment used as a displacement means the opposite thing reversed. Wire one into a Vector input and the result goes the other way.
For a region, direction is the winding of its boundary, and the winding is what tells an outer boundary from a hole.
- Segment. Its two ends swap.
- Arc and elliptical arc. The ends swap and the sweep turns round, together. Swapping the ends on their own would send the arc the long way round instead, which is a different shape.
- Path. Every contour is walked the other way.
- Region and boolean. The winding turns round.
- Circle and ellipse are left alone. A closed circle stores no direction to flip, so it is skipped rather than refused.
- Managed and locked objects are skipped too.
It acts on whole objects only. Reversing half of something would leave a chain disagreeing with itself about which way it runs.
A glider on a segment stays where it is. It holds its position as a fraction along the segment, so swapping the ends without touching that fraction would slide every glider to the mirror position: the curve would look unchanged while the points sitting on it jumped. The command corrects for it. A glider on an arc holds an angle instead, which the reversal does not move, so arcs need no such correction.
Division points swap identity. Divide a segment into six and reverse it, and the six points are in exactly the same places, because the set of positions is the same either way. Nothing looks different. But the first division is now the fifth, so anything you attached to division one is now attached to what used to be division five. The same goes for divisions along an arc. This one is easy to miss precisely because the picture does not change.
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- Reverse Direction: the same operation as a node.
- Reverse: a different thing entirely, which reorders a list rather than turning geometry round.
- Show Curve Direction: see which way things run before and after.
- Offset: the clearest case of direction changing a result.