Chapter 5
Making Arrangements

Featuring

As we leave the clubhouse turn in this part of the book, covering CorelDRAW fundamentals, you have already been exposed to much of the essence of vector-based drawing. This chapter completes the picture on ways that objects can be manipulated, and if you are in search of a course syllabus, then pull down the Arrange menu. To an item, those are the topics we’ll cover here.

Transformations 101

Moving an object is easy—you’ve already learned that. You click and hold on it while you drag the mouse. Same with sizing, stretching, skewing, and rotating—they all can easily be done with your hand and your mouse.

But some actions must be carried out with precision, and for those times, you’ll want to get up close and personal with the Transformation docker, available from Arrange Ø Transformation. The five pages of this docker cover all of the types of basic actions that can be performed on objects or groups of objects. We define “basic” as meaning that the object still maintains its core identity, unlike if a special effect were applied to it. The five transformations are:

•  Positioning

•  Rotating

•  Scaling and mirroring

•  Sizing

•  Skewing

All five of these transformations can be done by hand and mouse, but not with the precision possible from the docker controls. Figure 5.1 shows how you might move an object to the right by a prescribed amount. We are about to click Apply and make it happen; if we were to click Apply to Duplicate, that would be the same as the drag-and-dupe operation discussed in Chapter 3.

FIGURE 5.1  When you need precision, your mouse just won’t do.

However, we must mince our words a bit. While these new docker windows are spiffy and powerful, we know from our surveys that many of you prefer to perform your precision operations from the property bar. And for good reason—if you study Figure 5.1, from left to right, you’ll see all of the basic transformation controls present:

•  Object Position

•  Object Size

•  Scale Factor (change just one of the two values to skew; click down the lock icon to prevent that)

•  Angle of Rotation

•  Mirror

We have nothing against Corel’s dockers, but we see far less need to visit them these days. The dockers and the property bar handle basic services identically. In the following sections, we’ll discuss the services that are available only in the dockers.

	TIP To find out what an icon on the property bar does, hover your cursor over it for a moment, and a description will appear.

Working with the Transformation Dockers

Working these docker windows is easy, so instead of a tutorial, here are a few rules of thumb.

Select the Object First!

If you don’t have an object or a group selected, all five of these docker windows will be dormant, grayed out, and otherwise asleep.

Apply to Duplicate

All five of the Transformation dockers offer this button, providing blank-and-dupe services. You fill in the blank: drag, rotate, scale, size, skew. They all can be accomplished on screen with your mouse or through this group of dockers, the latter offering precision that your mouse, hands, and screen couldn’t approach.

The property bar controls do not have Apply to Duplicate capability.

The Check Box and Tic-Tac-Toe

Each of these dockers offers a check box that you can click to further define the operation. In two of them—Position and Rotation—the option determines whether the values for horizontal and vertical placement describe the object’s movement with respect to a fixed reference point (like the edge of the page), or relative to the current position of the object.

In the Scale & Mirror and Size dockers, you can provide for proportional operation, in which changing one direction (horizontal or vertical) will automatically cause the other to change by the same proportion. And in the Skew docker, the Use Anchor Point check box does nothing at all unless you also use the grid to indicate an anchor point other than the center.

This grid, which we like to call the tic-tac-toe controls, determines from which part of the object the transformation is to take place. If you use Position and you click the lower-left box in the grid, the object will move down and to the right. Click top-middle and the object moves straight up.

We have been writing about these check boxes and tic-tac-toe grids since 1993 and we still don’t know them by heart (we always have to play with them before we write up this section). We could do a long, exhaustive treatise on them, but they are the kinds of tools that must be used to be understood.