Drawing a right-Line.-
The detailed understanding of the process of creating a line, will serve as a paradigm for many other operations and/or objects. Those are the steps to create, work-with and correct or modify it using the editing mode. Everything will be done, theoretically, just after launching Metagraf.
The "line" button on the vertical tool-bar (the second one) should be clicked with the left-mouse-button. The mouse cursor will change as explained before.
In the drawing-screen, and placing the active point of the cursor in the place where the beginning of the line is wanted, the left-mouse-button should be pressed without releasing the pressure of the finger, and the cursor dragged to the final point wanted for the line and, finally, released.
Along this process, a line of color mauve will be seen with a green point near the cursor, until the button is released. Then a normal black line, will be seen on the drawing screen.
Depending of the grid chosen (by default the one millimeter/four pixels one), when dragging the mouse it will be possible to appreciate a certain "non continuity" in its movement. This is due to the fact that Metagraf works in mode "snap-to-grid", and according to the gird used, the points accessible to the cursor will be the intersections of the lines composing the grid. If this is not wanted, just choosing the "no-grid" will do it.
Once the line is on the screen, if the mouse cursor is moved it will be possible to see a change on its shape when it is over the line. The new shape is the select shape. The three cursors mentioned, "draw-line", "standard edit" and "select", can be seen below:
The "hand" and "select"
cursors can change minimally according with the OS and/or
distribution used.
When the cursor over any line of any object on
the screen change its shape to the select shape, the object
can be selected by just pressing the left button of the mouse. (It
should be mentioned that some lines of some objects are not shown on
the screen but the cursor will change to the select shape if it is
over those lines. This is specially frequent with curved objects as
beziers or splines.)
Madrid, January 2006 |
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