Turn Mould on/off temporarily

[Odat]

As discussed in: http://talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?p=368292

It would be very handy to be able to select inside of a mould and edit the contents as normal without removing the mould first, as some steps may be required to get things back to where they started.

Since that would be challenging, a good compromise (to me) would be a button in the Mould Tool similar to the one in the Extrude tool that could temporarily remove the envelopes applied for editing, and then reapply them to get back to where you started from.

[angelize]

Oh yes that would be very useful. +1

[amoore]

Agreed. +1

[jclements]

Agreed +1

[Big Frank]

Yes! +1

[Christine Farrelly]

You can already do this - use copy mould from the mould tool info bar, remove mould, do your edit then paste the mould back.

Christine

[Odat]

That doesn't work 100% of the time.

In the attached XAR file there are two moulds (the second is a duplicate of the first).

Lets say I want to apply a light contone color to the bottom mould to make it appear blue-ish instead of gray.

You can't select inside the mould and hit just the bitmap, so you can't do this directly. So, I go into the mould tool, click "Copy Mould Shape", then remove the mould and apply my contone.

All done, I click "Paste Perspective", and Voila!, the mould is the correct shape again.. but it's way too small and it's position on the page has been altered.

Now my workaround is to write down the dimensions and coordinates of the object, then go into the mould tool, copy and detach, modify, repaste mould shape, go into selector tool, manually change size and position to match what I had to begin with.

The button in the Extrude tool that turns the extrude on and off retains all other properties, but just doesn't render as 3D temporarily. If the mould tool had the same sort of button, this sort of problem wouldn't exist.

[amoore]

In addition to the procedure Odat describes, I usually duplicate the mould object and make the changes on the duplicate. That way, I don't lose the reference object until I'm sure I've got the new one right.

Plus, sometimes it's easier to lock the original, drag the duplicate on top of it and make sure the outlines are accurate.

[Christine Farrelly]

Odat - looking at your file it appears that you changed the size after applying the mould - removing the mould resets the size back. Logically that is all that Xara knows about the object(s) before the mould was applied.

Christine

[Odat]

True, but the same thing works with an Extrude; you can extrude text, resize it, turn off the extrude, edit, and turn the extrude back on, and you still get what you started with; it doesn't shrink the extrude back to the size that it was to begin with.

It would be cool if you could easily do that with a mould, but you can't. If you decide to make any modifications to the mould object after you've set it up, and then want to edit what you've moulded, you need to jump through hoops to easily get back where you started from.