Grouping Objects.-
The possibility of making a sole group object from
many individual ones can solve many problems in different situations.
It is not "the solution for everything" but used reasonably
and with knowledge can be a very important tool.
If there are
several objects on the drawing screen and it is wanted to group some
of them, the simplest way is to select those objects and press the
"group selected objects" button (tool-tip: Group).
If it
is wanted to group all the objects on the screen it is not needed to
select anyone; just clicking the button "group-all-objects"
(tool-tip: Group-all), will do it. The mentioned buttons are shown
below:
Once some
objects are grouped together they lose their individual properties
for working with them, (i.e. they cannot be selected one by one), and
the group itself takes their place as a new object that can be
selected, transformed, moved, etc. The contour of the group is a
rectangle where all the points defining each object are included. It
is drawn in a yellowish clear color when not selected and red if
selected.
Although being an object by itself, a group has some of
the properties of the individual objects but not all of them: there
are not "defining points" to select, nor quick or direct
rotation and/or scaling, and it is unaffected by zoom actions as will
be explained.
Nevertheless, the group is prepared for some actions
of great importance. One of those actions is the interest of rotating
several objects around one only point. If there are many objects not
grouped to be rotated, it will be necessary to create center-points
for each object; move all those center-points to the one place chosen
as the rotation center and finally, rotate all the objects. It can be
a very difficult, not to say impossible, task in certain
situations.
Using groups, rotating twenty objects at the same time
around a single point can be as simple as rotating one object alone:
create a group, place its center-point, rotate, and ungroup all.
The
same is true for scaling. Below is a figure of a compound object
scaled to 70% of its original dimensions and rotated 90 degrees. Each
group has 77 objects.
Madrid, January 2006 |
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