I’m curious if there is a way to do this without having to math:
A colleague is mocking up a project for a glass window for which we have the lengths of each side (see attached
)
We know the bottom right corner is a 90 degree angle, but not the others - is there a way to make a 4-sided shape in illustrator and enter the needed lengths, rather than making a path of each length and then trying to align them?
No, but making the bottom and right sides together using the Transform panel should be easy enough. Then the other 2 sides, drawn independently and joined up using Smart Guides and the Rotate and Join tools just now took me roughly 14 seconds total; no math required.
If you do this kind of thing regularly, there’s CADtools, which is an Illustrator plugin. It’s not cheap, though.
Bottom and right sides form a right angle
draw a diagonal from bottom left to top right
Pythagoras gives this length as 107.11
you now have 2 triangles of known sides
18.5 - 105.5 - 107.11 internal angles 90 - 9.95 - 80.05
43 - 96 - 107.11 internal angles 92.83 - 63.53 - 23.64
Not sure how this might help you though . . .
With the right and bottom sides defined, draw a circle radius 96" centred at bottom left, another circle radius 43" centred at top right. Where the two intersect will be your top left point.