The Rest of the Team

The other commands on the Arrange menu are straightforward, so we will just describe them briefly. To see how they are used in various exercises throughout these chapters, consult our index.

Order

This is DRAW’s gateway to creating stacking options of objects. Most drawing programs offer ways to place objects in front of all others and behind all others. DRAW does one better by allowing you to specify precisely which object the selected one should be placed in front of or behind. With an object selected, go to Arrange Ø Order Ø In Front Of (or Behind). DRAW offers you a pointing arrow, and once you click on an object on the page, DRAW instantly stacks the selected object accordingly.

It’s good to know the hotkeys here:

You can also reach all of these commands from the context menu, the one that appears when you right-click on the selected object.

Group

There’s not much to say about this venerable command. It throws a lasso around all selected objects. Ctrl+G and Ctrl+U have become second nature to keystroke lovers. Note the presence also, on both the Arrange and context menus, of an Ungroup All command. Many pieces of clipart come with groups inside of groups. This command will find the groups nested within other groups and ungroup them, too.

You can always select objects within groups by holding Ctrl as you click. DRAW will display rounded selection handles as your cue that you are working with objects within a group.

Combine and Break Apart

These two cousins are opposites. Combine takes selected objects and forces them into one curve. As we discussed in Chapter 3, overlapping objects appear as hollow cutouts. Meanwhile, Break Apart does the reverse, seeking out any subpaths to a curve and extracting them as separate objects.

The notable exception is with text. Two strings of artistic text, when combined, become one string of text, still editable. One string of text, when broken apart, becomes single-character individual letters. A double-deck headline, when broken apart, becomes two separate strings consisting of the first line and the second. The same in all of these cases goes for paragraph text.

If, however, you combine a string of text with a nontext object, DRAW shows no such reverence—it converts everything to a single curve.

Both commands are available via hotkeys (Ctrl+L and Ctrl+K, respectively) and from the context menu.

Lock and Unlock

Any object created or imported can be locked and made impervious to change. When you select a locked object, the selection handles look like little padlocks. No change can be made to a locked object until it is unlocked, from Arrange Ø Unlock or from the context menu.

Shaping

This is the gateway to the three noteworthy commands for dealing with overlapping objects. Intersect, Trim, and Weld are the stars of Chapter 11.

Separate

It might sound like Break Apart, but this command is different. While you can use Break Apart on any object that contains subpaths, Separate is reserved for taking apart objects that have been altered with one of DRAW’s special effects.

When you apply commands such as Fit Text to Path, Blend, Extrude, Contour, and Drop Shadow, you create a dynamic link between multiple objects. That link allows the effect to adjust as you move or edit one of the objects. For instance, if you move or recolor one of the objects of a blend, the entire blend adjusts. This link stays live until you kill it, and you do that with Separate.

This is not an Undo command—the appearance of the effect remains. You are telling DRAW to stop thinking of the objects as part of a dynamic effect, but rather just a collection of objects that happen to look like the effect.

Figure 5.4 shows the result of separating an extruded star. Until we moved the face of the extrusion, you wouldn’t have known anything had happened. But once separated, each object that makes up the effect can be individually reached.

FIGURE 5.4  Separating a special effect is like giving it a lobotomy: it no longer remembers what it once was.

Convert to Curves

This is the command that strips VIP status from rectangles, ellipses, polygons, and strings of artistic text. In each of those objects, DRAW reserves a certain reverence. It will not allow conventional node-editing to them, using the Shape tool instead for different purposes (such as rounding corners of rectangles, making pie slices from ellipses, and kerning characters of text).

The Convert to Curves command is what makes the mighty fall. Once converted, these special objects become distinctly unspecial. Once converted, you can node-edit a rectangle as if it were just another common curve. Same with text.

Convert Outline to Object

This brand new command separates an outline that has been applied to an object and makes it its own object. It converts it to a closed shape, however thin, and that has enormous implications for designers who have long wanted to apply a pattern to an outline, instead of just a uniform color. Once an outline is converted to an object, it can take any fill pattern that DRAW offers. Creating fountain-filled outlines has historically been very difficult; now it is easy.