Basic Drawing - 6

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.





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Madrid, January 2006