Chapter 19
The Power of the Clip

Featuring

This last stop on our tour through DRAW’s special effects features what many consider the most useful tool of all. PowerClip is the super-duper cropping tool that enables you to place an object or image inside another object. This feature first appeared in DRAW 5, and it has become a favorite of many.

Like Lens and Interactive Transparency, PowerClip doesn’t change an object; it determines how we see an object.

The “Stuff Inside” Command

While the technical term for the operation is the creation of a “clipping path,” we prefer to think of PowerClip as simply stuffing one object into another. But to better understand what PowerClip does, we’ll start by telling you what PowerClip does not do.

For starters, PowerClip does not work like Trim. While you can achieve similar results with both tools, Trim literally removes unwanted parts of an object, while PowerClip only hides them from view. Trim’s appetite is increased from the days when it could only digest one object at a time, but it still has its limits; PowerClip, however, can spin its magic on hundreds of objects at once, if necessary.

Finally, do you remember the Pepsi-Cola commercial of two years ago? The boy at the beach who draws so hard on the straw that he sucks himself entirely into the bottle? That, too, is not how PowerClip works, because PowerClip introduces no distortion at all as it stuffs one object into another.

Instead, PowerClip crops one object (or group of objects) to fit within a shape. Anything that doesn’t fit is ignored. Free-form cropping has long been a feature of painting and image-editing programs such as PHOTO-PAINT, but bringing this operation into DRAW was not so easy. With PAINT, it’s a simple matter to create a “mask” and erase all pixels that fall outside of the mask. But unlike a paint program or a manual trim job—both of which delete the portion that is outside of the desired area—PowerClip maintains the integrity of the original object. If you decide to undo a powerclipped object, just extract the contents—it’s as if nothing had ever happened to them. Try doing that with a paint program.

If you followed along with Chapter 10, “Advanced Text Handling,” you saw a good example of powerclipping in action, where a picture of a sunset was placed inside the word Sunset. PowerClip effectively trims the object to fit within a shape. Anything that falls outside the boundaries of the powerclip container is simply hidden from view. (We’ll explain containers shortly.)

PowerClip Basics

Creating a powerclip is simple: select one or more objects to be clipped, go to Effects Ø PowerClip Ø Place inside Container, and then click on the container object. The objects to be clipped can be literally anything—even an imported bitmap, as you saw in Chapter 10. The container can be anything created in DRAW, with the exception of paragraph text. That also rules out bitmaps, but as far as we can tell, anything else is eligible, including multipathed objects, groups, text, envelopes, extrusions, even another powerclip.

Try this exercise on for size:

1.  In a new drawing, go to the Symbols docker. From Plants, drag the palm tree (symbol #33) onto the page. From Animals1, drag in an elephant (symbol #52). (This assumes you installed both the Plants and Animals1 symbol fonts when you installed DRAW. If not, you can either install the fonts before continuing, or just select other symbols to use for this exercise.)

2.  Shade the palm tree dark and the elephant light, and then select and group them together.

3.  Draw an ellipse around the group, using the Ctrl key to make it a perfect circle. Remove the fill and then position and size the circle so parts of both the palm tree and the elephant are outside.

4.  Reselect the group, and go to Effects Ø PowerClip Ø Place inside Container.

5.  Carefully position the arrow cursor on the outline of the circle. That’s how you tell DRAW that you want the circle to be the container for the two selected objects.

6.  Click on the circle and watch DRAW stuff the tree and the elephant into the circle. Whatever fits, you see; what doesn’t fit, you don’t see.