Measure Distances and Angles on Your Screen with MB-Ruler

If you always wanted to find the angle at which a road turns in your city, then you need Google maps and MB-Ruler. MB-Ruler is a freeware for Windows which lets you measure distances and angles on your screen. It is like having a virtual ruler and protractor on your computer screen. It also comes with a coordinate system using which you can find the two-dimensional Cartesian coordinates for any point on your screen.

You can download MB-Ruler from their website. The download is a setup installer of around 2 megabytes in size. After the installation, it would place two icons in the Windows notification area. One of icons is for quickly changing the screenshot settings while another icon is for switching through various measurement tools.

Measure Distances and Angles on Your Screen with MB-Ruler

MBRuler comes with four measurement tools – triangular ruler, coordinate system, marker point and single line measurement. The triangular ruler tool is a combination of a protractor and a distance measuring tool. You can drag it around and rotate on your screen. The angle and distance from the center of this tool to the mouse cursor is dynamically measured and shown on your screen.

Measure Distances and Angles on Your Screen with MB-Ruler

The Cartesian system shows the axes on your system. The axes are labeled x1 and x2 instead of usual x and y. As you move your mouse cursor around on your screen, the coordinate of your mouse cursor are shown relative to the origin of the axes shown. You can move the axes themselves by dragging them on your screen and thus changing the origin.

Measure Distances and Angles on Your Screen with MB-Ruler

The marker tool is a point marker tool – it places a point on your screen. The measure-line tool can help you measure the distance in a straight line between two points. In addition, MB-Ruler has a built-in magnifier that can be invoked from the context menu and allows you to read text that is too small for the naked eye. You can also toggle grid view on your screen. In the options, you can change many settings, including the change of the angle measure in radians or degrees.

This is a very useful tool for graphics designers who are studying a picture in order to replicate it in Photoshop or Gimp. You can also use this tool to measure the angles between different objects on a map or in a machine design or architecture drawing.

You can download MB-Ruler from http://www.markus-bader.de/MB-Ruler/.