Realigning Alignment

Here is one of our lead author’s pet peeves: “I will never understand the logic,” he says, “behind having more than one property bar for text. Corel has made a distinction between selecting a string or frame of text, and having your cursor in the text, actually editing. Perhaps there is a reason for this, but c’mon—not being able to align a paragraph unless your cursor is in it? That’s crazy!”

Allow us to clarify, with a slightly more diplomatic tone. Let’s say you have a headline in a frame of paragraph text and you want to center it. With your cursor in the headline, you can easily head to the property bar for text and choose the Center icon from the Alignment drop-down list. But if you have selected an entire frame or string of text, the alignment controls disappear—DRAW has two distinct property bars for text, depending upon if the cursor is in the text, or not. We think that’s, um, silly, and here is how you can fix it:

1.  Set some text and select all of it, with no editing cursor in place. In other words, make DRAW show you the property bar that lacks the Alignment drop-down list.

2.  Right-click on any toolbar and click Text to invoke the Text toolbar.

This is not a context-sensitive property bar, but instead a static toolbar with the most popular text functions. We’re not sure if Corel anticipated that users would want to actively use it, or if they thought it would serve as a storage house for text functions. The latter use is what we are interested in, because it includes the one control we want to have placed on the Text property bar.

3.  Press and hold both Ctrl and Alt.

4.  Find the Alignment drop-down list (to the right of Underline).

5.  Click and drag it up to the property bar and drop it. Release Ctrl and Alt.

6.  Close the Text toolbar—you don’t need it anymore.

Now you will be able to align text, irrespective of the presence of the text cursor. As these two property bars are a bit different, the control will likely jump from one position to the other as DRAW switches bars, but that’s easy to cope with. Not having the control at all is what is aggravating.

Standard? Says Who??

Now that you have a sense of how the Standard toolbar and the property bars behave, you can begin to scrutinize the placement of icons. There isn’t that much space on the Standard toolbar—if an icon is going to always be visible, it had better be pretty important. Therefore, we suggest you treat the Standard toolbar as precious real estate and make sure that the icons there are worthy of their positions. Our lead author likes to joke about placing icons on probation: “Every few weeks or so,” he says, “I browse the icons on the Standard toolbar. If I haven’t clicked one since the last time I checked, I put it on probation. If it doesn’t get clicked from now until the next checkpoint, I fire it.”

We asked Rick to perform one of his routine checks for us. Here is our ruthless leader’s report:

For starters, I would wipe out the entire first section—I use the hotkeys for New, Open, Save, and Print. I can’t remember the last time I clicked on any of those four icons. Same with Cut, Copy, and Paste—I’ve been pressing Ctrl+X, C, and V since my days with an Osborne Computer. They’re history, too.

Redo is kind of an awkward keystroke (Ctrl+Shift+Z), so I’d keep the Redo icon there, and for consistency, I’d let Undo live, too. And there are times when I like to use the Import and Export icons if I know I’m going to have to mouse around to find the file.

The Zoom Levels list definitely stays, and so does the What’s This Help thingie. But Application Launcher and Corel Community can go bye-bye. When I’m done, there is all sorts of room for good stuff:

With all of that extra space, I think about the controls that I might need to use in many different contexts, or ones that are buried deep in the interface. Definitely the Nudge box. Also, I want permanent access to the orientation controls—Portrait and Landscape.

I also like the automatic Insert Page command that doesn’t ask you about before or after, or size, so I plucked that one out of Customize. I record scripts a lot, so I want one-click access to the Script and Preset docker.

I regularly activate the IE and Pantone palettes—no sense in schlepping up to the Window menu every time I want one of them. And turning on and off color correction is a nightmare—thank goodness there’s an icon for that!

There are times when I want to see a Properties sheet but don’t feel like right-clicking, so I click the Object Properties icon. And while I really like the new interactive controls, I prefer to edit blends with a docker. You know, all of the special effects still have dockers—they’re just hidden.

Finally, several of the graphic icons for these commands are hideous, so I changed them to English. Now this is a toolbar that I can sink my teeth into...

Our lead author assumes many facts not yet in evidence, but rest assured we’ll cover them before this chapter is finished. Most notable in his little diatribe are the facts that you can set any icon to display in text, and that there are dozens of commands that Corel’s interface designers chose not to place on the visible interface. If you didn’t know to search for them, you would never know they existed at all.

Interchangeable Parts

This simple technique of dragging items from one toolbar to another is central to your customization strategy, so you should practice it until you get a feel for it, keeping in mind these things:

•  Press and hold Alt to unlock DRAW’s interface, allowing all icons to be relocated.

•  Press and hold Ctrl along with Alt to copy an icon instead of move it.

•  To invoke one of the hidden toolbars, right-click on a visible one and pick it from the list. Once visible, you can copy and move those icons, as well.

•  To return any toolbar or property bar to its original condition, do this:

1.  Go to Window Ø Toolbars (or right-click on a bar and choose Toolbars).

2.  Choose the desired toolbar and click Reset.

•  Any of the nine toolbox flyouts can be pulled off and floated on screen.

•  All of these changes will be remembered from one DRAW session to the next.

All of this type of remodeling falls under the heading of workspace changes. If you created a personal workspace and set it to be current, as we recommend at the top of this chapter, all of these changes would be recorded there. Otherwise, they would be recorded in whatever workspace is current, probably _default.