The Shape Edit Flyout

The tools in this flyout, led by the Shape tool itself, preside over parts of an object, rather than the whole. While you would reach for the Pick tool to move or resize an entire curve or a whole string of text, the Shape tool and its brothers (the Knife, Eraser, and Free Transform tool) provide access to a part of the curve or one character in the text string. The parts of a curve are called nodes (the Shape tool is commonly referred to as the Node Edit tool), and by adjusting a node you can change the essential shape of a curve.

In addition to node-editing, the Shape tool can edit and kern selected text characters, crop bitmaps, round the corners of rectangles, and turn circles into arcs and pie slices.

Hotkey: F10

	NOTE Note the downward-pointing triangle in the lower right of the icon. Seven of the tools display this, and it indicates the presence of a flyout menu. Click and hold the icon and the flyout appears.

The Zoom Flyout

The Zoom tool is one of the most essential aids to creating and editing illustrations because it lets you work in the optimum magnification. The toolbox offers you quick access to the Zoom In tool, which you can use to drag a marquee around the area you want to magnify. The flyout offers a panning tool as well, which we suspect you won’t use too often, because the panning technique of using Alt and your arrow keys is faster and more convenient.

The other Zoom commands are available from the View Manager (reached from the Zoom toolbar, one of several toolbars that you can place on screen). All told, you can use zoom the following ways in DRAW:

•  Zoom In allows you to define a marquee around the area you want to magnify.

•  Pan enables you to pan around a drawing by dragging.

•  Zoom Out enables you to reduce the view of a magnified area.

•  Zoom Actual Size lets you display your drawing at its actual printing size.

•  Zoom to Selected brings selected objects into the closest possible view.

•  Zoom to All Objects brings all objects in a drawing into the closest possible view.

•  Zoom to Page displays the entire page.

•  Zoom to Page Width brings the width of the page into close view.

•  Zoom to Page Height brings the length of the page into close view.

Hotkeys: F2 for triggering Zoom In mode, F3 for Zoom Out, Shift+F2 for Zoom to Selected, F4 for Zoom to All Objects, and Shift+F4 for Zoom to Page

The Curve Flyout

If the Pick tool is the essential editing tool, then the Freehand tool is the essential creation tool. It is the electronic equivalent of the artist’s sketching pencil. The Freehand tool’s primary mission is to support freehand drawing and Bézier drawing, but several other types of drawing tools are part of this combined tool. Click on the tool and hold for a moment to access the flyout, and then hover your cursor over each one to see its name.

Freehand drawing really is like working with a pencil: to draw, you hold the mouse button down and move around the page. If you remember the old Etch-a-Sketch contraptions, you can get a good idea of the type of free-form (and sometimes dreadful) work this tool is capable of.

Bézier drawing creates the smooth curves required by fine art and illustration. When drawing in Bézier mode, you do not hold down the mouse button to create curves. Rather, you click once to define a starting point and then click again to define an ending point. The path that connects the two is treated as a curve or a line whose shape and position can be readily changed. Most of the attractive work you see produced with DRAW makes extensive use of Bézier curves. The Natural Pen tool might as well be called the Felt Pen. If you think of it that way, that’s all the description you need.

The dimension tools feature lines that automatically calculate their distances and their angles, and lines that connect and stay connected for the purpose of creating flowcharts and organization charts.

Hotkey: F5

The Rectangle and Ellipse Tools

The first tools most new users reach for—the simple Rectangle and Ellipse tools—produce their respective shapes with simple click-and-drag maneuvers. Once created, these shapes inherit the default outlines and fills that are in effect for that DRAW session. With both the Rectangle and Ellipse tools, if you hold the Shift key while dragging, the object draws from the center out. If you hold the Ctrl key while dragging, you can create squares and perfect circles.

Hotkeys: F6 for Rectangle, and F7 for Ellipse

The Object Flyout

It must not have been a very inspiring day at Corel when the developers named this set of tools. From this rather drab-sounding flyout comes the rather exciting Polygon, Spiral, and Graph Paper tools. The Polygon tool does more than just create stars; it creates dynamic objects with multiple sides, all of which move as you move one of them. The spiral tool makes spirals (imagine that), and the Graph Paper tool makes grids of boxes, according to your specification. Nested in this tool are two other tools, one for making spirals and another for making grids.

Hotkey: None, but like all other parts of the interface, you can assign one to each of the three.

The Text Tool

This tool brings the written word to your drawings. By clicking once on the Text icon and then once on the page, you can create artistic text, the more versatile of the two text types. This text can be enhanced with all the special effects DRAW has to offer, such as extrusions, blends, and fitting to a path.

With the Text tool, you can also create paragraph text, ideal for creating blocks of copy. To use the Text tool to create paragraphs, you click the tool and then go to the page and click and drag to form a rectangular boundary for the text. When you do this, DRAW knows you want to create paragraph text instead of artistic text.

Hotkey: F8

The Fill Flyout

With this tool, you can make quick changes to fills and patterns without having to retreat to a dialog. It triggers its own property bar, with all of the primary fill patterns and controls present. The other tool on the flyout is the new Mesh tool, capable of creating freeform patterns with solid colors.

Hotkey: None

The Interactive Transparency Tool

With this tool, you can apply transparency to objects with on-screen controls. The most noteworthy distinction of this feature is its ability to apply transparency to any object, be it a vector object you create in DRAW or a bitmap image you import from elsewhere. Furthermore, transparency doesn’t have to be flat and even; you can create graduated transparencies that more closely mirror life.

Hotkey: None

The Interactive Tool Flyout

Another uninspired name, if we do say so. This should have been called the Effects flyout, because it is now the primary residence of all of DRAW’s amazing special effects. Blend gets top billing thanks to its position as leadoff hitter, but batting behind it are contour, distortions, envelopes, extrusions, and drop shadows.

Hotkey: None, but all can be given custom hotkeys.

The Eyedropper Flyout

This brand new pair of tools makes it very easy to determine colors used in an image or an object and apply them to other objects. The Eyedropper can sniff out a color in any type of object, including an imported bitmap, and it honors the type of color model used. We’ll show you how these new tools operate in Chapter 6.

Hotkey: None.