Set Origin Position

[phpdesigner]

How do you use this feature?

[covoxer]

Select object and turn to the rotation mode (either by second click on it or by clicking on the rotation button). You'll see the rotation and skew handles and the rotation center displayed. When you rotate the object, it will do so around the rotation center. You can move the rotation center freely by simply dragging it with the mouse. The nine buttons here are for its quick alignment. The middle button will bring the center of the rotation to the center of the object. Corners bring it to corners. Sides - to the middle of the side of the object.
Try it - it's very intuitive and quite useful sometimes.

[phpdesigner]

Great thanks man..

I was thinking it might be to set the point from which the position x,y was taken from, that too would be an awsome function!...

[jwhitham]

It also positions the axis about which flips are performed, extremely useful when you're drawing something symetrical.

[zaphodeist]

You can hold and drag this to set x,y of the page ... is that what you meant?

[phpdesigner]

No I mean... say a square top left is 0,0.

Hit the top right button and the co-ordinates are measured from that position.
Hit the middle and the co-ordinates are measured from there. Very handy.
It means you can enter co-ordinates for the object, relative to the centre without any calculation. I think CorelDraw does this..

[ss-kalm]

As John said above, drag the cross hair from the corner, and with the magnet on, it will snap to any object that you require. You can thus position the 0,0 origin anywhere that you want accurately. If you use guidelines, you can position them accurately via their properties, and snap the origin to them too.

[phpdesigner]

No thats not what I mean / want.

Say you have a square its positioned by its top left hand corner. To enter its position you are changing the value for that corner. Say I make the centre of my page x=0. If I position my square x=0 it will be off set by its own width. However if I can tell the program that the centre of the square is its positioning tag, I can just say the squares tag x=0 and as the page centre is x=0 the square is easily centred.

Super quick.

Xara imho is the best, but it needs work in this area. If I turn on Snap and draw two spares of a random size, they dont even snap to each other unless I calculate or use a grid. Don't want to design with a grid. Its to restrictive.
Take a look at Illustrator in this area, its awesome drawing angled guides etc. Super slow redraw and calculation, but super flexible snap etc.

Unless I am missing something, in which case .. fill me in :-)

[MEB]

It also positions the axis about which flips are performed, extremely useful when you're drawing something symetrical.

WOW! So many years working with Xara Xtreme and i never associated the telephone pad thing for alignment with the flip operations...
And it´s so useful. I remember a couple of times where i could have used it.
Thank you for pointing this out