Fancy Transforms

I have a shape I would like to construct: a cube with a circle taken out of
each face. It is VERY easy to make one face (squair, circle, subtract).
Problem is tranforming this face to the other two angles. Visio does not
have a "shear" function as far as I can tell. If this were just a problem of
taking a set coodinates and using a matrix to transform them I would whip up
the code. But I don't think it is that simple since the shapes use (width*1
etc) to define coordinates. Well a shear would definitly change the width,
but the points would no longer have those proportionality constants. The
other problem is that the circle is not just a big set of points, the circle
is defined by a function and if it were so simple to just shape and squeeze
to an ellipse I could draw it out by hand. So before I go and break my head
upon coding up something: has anyone found such a transform? or is there
another way.

What I am thinking about doing is using VB to find all my coordinates
(includeing the control points for a Bezier curve to make the circle) and
then find a way to import this into VISIO (like with a SVG file).

Wierd timing I was just looking at one of Chris Roth's old blogs on shear.
http://www.wanderkind.com/visio/archives/2006_09_01_archive.html
Hopefully Chris will drop by soon.

Chris: you should add these articles to your new blog.

John... Visio MVP

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"Nicholas M. Makin" <nmaximillian.DeleteThis@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:emdqRY$GHHA.4844@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
>I have a shape I would like to construct: a cube with a circle taken out of
>each face. It is VERY easy to make one face (squair, circle, subtract).
>Problem is tranforming this face to the other two angles. Visio does not
>have a "shear" function as far as I can tell. If this were just a problem
>of taking a set coodinates and using a matrix to transform them I would
>whip up the code. But I don't think it is that simple since the shapes use
>(width*1 etc) to define coordinates. Well a shear would definitly change
>the width, but the points would no longer have those proportionality
>constants. The other problem is that the circle is not just a big set of
>points, the circle is defined by a function and if it were so simple to
>just shape and squeeze to an ellipse I could draw it out by hand. So before
>I go and break my head upon coding up something: has anyone found such a
>transform? or is there another way.
>
> What I am thinking about doing is using VB to find all my coordinates
> (includeing the control points for a Bezier curve to make the circle) and
> then find a way to import this into VISIO (like with a SVG file).
>
>
>