Translations:Assembly Basic Tutorial/30/en

As you already guessed from the name, with this constraint you can specify the distance between two geometries. This works for two points, but also for a point and a line, or a line and a cylinder and many more combinations. This constraint is pretty simple, but two points need mentioning: First, if there are multiple possible distances between geometries, for example the last mentioned line and cylinder, then the shortest distance is used. Second, sometimes multiple solutions exist even for the shortest distance. This is the case for the point-plane distance: every value can be satisfied with the point above AND below the plane. So if you only specify the value, it can happen that FreeCAD puts the point at the wrong side of the plane. To control this, the distance constraint has a special option, the solution space. This option allows to reduce the space of possible solutions, so that it matches your wishes. Lets see how this works on our small example: