A permanent Xara rotation selection mode, please!

[eobet]

Imo, Xara needs a selection mode which remembers rotation and also rotates the selection handles (permantently) and applies any transformation in the rotated angle!

For example, if I rotatr an object by 15 degrees and unselect it, I would like to see the object still saying that it is rotated by 15 degrees the next time I select it. Also, the handles should be rotated by 15 degrees so that if I want to drag one side out, the object expands along the 15 degree angle.

A real world example where I'm greatly annoyed by the lack of this is when I try to fit ellipses into perspective (and yes, I know there's a perspective mould, but sometimes it is nice to keep them ellipses).

Right now, if I for example create a slanted icon set, I have to write down into the Xar file by what angle I rotated everything.

[jens g.r. benthien]

As long as you didn't modify/break/deform a basic shape, you can always select the tool for rectangle, ellipse etc, then you see at the top a drop down box with the options: width & height, rotation, center etc. Select rotation and modify the angle at any time.

[Daniel]

I think Xara must already internally know how something has been rotated in its past life.

Try this: (1) Draw a line and then use the (2) text tool to click onto the line so that your text will follow the path, and then type. Your text follows the line.

(3) Draw another line, but this time flip it (4, 5) horizontally and vertically using the triangle icons in the infobar. Click onto the line again with the (6) text tool exactly as you did before - this time your text appears underneath the line and back to front.

I don't know the significance of that, but it tells me that two lines that look identical are not really identical to Xara - one is upside down.

[jens g.r. benthien]

Well, what you have done is identical to 'reverse path' - the start node is now at the other end of the line, that means at the bottom right. Your original start point was at the upper left. And text flows from the start point to the end point of a line - which makes sense

[Charles Moir]

Eobet, your are right, we should have this feature. Worse, Artworks the predecessor of Xara X, actually had this feature to remember the angle of rotated objects.

It's just one of many hundreds of features that we'd like to see added to the program. We hope that if we can expand our developers base (either by selling more or by attracting open-source developers) we can make this feature real.

[jclements]

This feature can be useful **BUT**, if it is reimplemented, then I would recommended that there ALSO be a way FLUSH this value to ZERO and keep the ability to do relative changes.

CorelDRAW remembers the skew and rotation values (as absolute values) but it doesn't have a means for doing relative changes other than with VBA scripts or by manually subtracting or adding to the absolute value (this is done in their Property Bar, provided you have correct tool active). That is a huge pain. So if Xara is to reimplement an absolute value it should also keep its ability to easily input relative rotations and skews.

In technical illustrating, there are times when ALL objects or a selection set of objects in a drawing need to have their rotation and skew values modified; being able to "flush" those values back to zero (NOT their physical position or orientation) can be important.

My two cents from past experiences in doing tech illustrations.

Regards, John

P.S. If the open source initiative prooves to be successful, I would imagine some sort of scripting tools will be available. In that case, enabling objects to store or flush transformation values will be mean some sophisticated manipulations can be done. Also, creating an Undo list might be possible.

[PhilM]

Xara Xtreme does go some way towards doing what you want:

The ellipse, rectangle and quickshape objects record their rotation and allow it to be changed using the "centre/width and height/rotation" drop down menu of their respective tools. (Use "rotation" mode, obviously.)

But other types of object don't record their rotation from their original position and in fact it could be confusing to do so: Say you draw two lines using the freehand tool; one an arbitrary squiggle and the other a straight line at 30 degrees. When you select each of them they would report their angle as 0 degrees (0 degrees away from their original position) but that would look very odd for the 30 degree straight line.

There would also be issues with selecting many objects that have different angles; the rotation field would have to show "Many" but what would happen when you type an angle into it? Some people would want a relative rotation to be applied to all objects, some would want all objects to be reset to the specified angle. This is related to the point John is making and we would have to allow for both somehow.

You can see that, like most things in Xtreme, it might not be as simple as it looks.

One possible way to handle these different requirements is to do so in different tools. At the moment the Selector tool handles relative rotation and the ellipse/rect/quickshape tools can do absolute rotation. This is neat and logical but not very flexible.

Phil

[The Alien]

There would also be issues with selecting many objects that have different angles; the rotation field would have to show "Many" but what would happen when you type an angle into it? Some people would want a relative rotation to be applied to all objects, some would want all objects to be reset to the specified angle. This is related to the point John is making and we would have to allow for both somehow.

Yeah, that's a tricky one indeed.
One way that came up to me to do this would be to type +50 if you want 50 degrees added to the original rotation of the objects and type 50 if you want their rotation to be set to 50 degrees.
The tricky part though would be subtracting 50 degrees: -50 would not subtract the rotatoin angle by 50, but just set it to -50 :\
Maybe --50 (double minus) would work...or maybe I'm just babbling nonsense here
[edit]Or rather make that +-50, as in saying "add minus 50 degrees to the current angle". Makes more sense [/edit]

[jens g.r. benthien]

There would also be issues with selecting many objects that have different angles

You can group the objects, like throwing them into a new Null Object in CAD, and then rotate them. But this requires that the rotation angles of the sub objects will be tracked, that means as soon as you remove the Null Object the other objects will have their tracked angle plus the angle of rotation for the Null Object. However, then there would be the issue with the center of rotation, which can (and in most cases will) be different.

But we are talking about an illustration package here, not CAD...