Can a bezier handles be made symmetric with one click?

[sandy673]

Thanks a lot for your help!
I had a bigger reply standing here but now it's gone, .. oh. "Reply to Thread" was not really the right thing to click after I head written the text, nope...

[bcire68]

I for one was glad to be of service to you, Sandy.

Did you get a chance to watch those video tutorials for which I added a link in a prior post?

Eric

[sandy673]

Hello Sandy,

Unfortunately there is no single click way to do this in Xara. However you can use guidelines and magic snapping to make it easier to do this. Turn on rulers, make sure snap to guides is checked in the window menu, and drag a vertical guideline. Draw your line and pull it into a curve, with magic snapping turned on (the magnet icon) you can easily snap your line centered on the guide line, then simply drag the bezier handles to snap them to the guideline, and by adding more guidelines equal distances from the center you can set your curve how you like.

Attachment 87156 Attachment 87155

Ohh, now I understood it, instead of changing the point to symmetric, I delete it. Then when I add a point in the middle, it will be symmetric and it stays symmetric when I move it to where the deleted point was.

[sandy673]

The "Things you may or may not know about the Shape Editor Tool", I'm about to watch them now.. This will definately help me, because I know very few about Xara.

[bcire68]

Very good. Let me know how you get on or if you don't understand something.

Eric

[sandy673]

Handdrawn pointed me to your video to fill unclosed shapes. This was exactly what I needed to know. It's not in the help file, is it?
I wonder why Xara will show the closing line when zooming to 401% or more. Won't this confuse someone?

[handrawn]

as I said in the other thread sandy - this is an 'unsupported' feature - that is it does not happen by design, it is if you like an 'unintended consequence' of the way group-join-break works in this instance

so of course the behaviour of the closing line on zoom is 'unintended' too..

you need to be aware that this is unsupported if you make use of it

it is likely that the closing line is there all the time, but is just not being rendered [displayed] to screen [or print?] at zooms below 401% and this might cause more unexpected occurance with further editing of that object

[sandy673]

To be honest, I don't know what way to use now.

Handrawn, do you use this way of filling unclosed shapes when you use xara?
Bcire, do you use it always?
Angelize, do you use it?

Could those shapes break with Xara 8 or would the Xara developers help those who used the unsupported way?

I knew it from Illustrator or Corel I think. Maybe I like it because the line stays along with the line always. But a group would give me this benefit too.

And from this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...fT7Z69F9A&NR=1 I know now that from those many small line segments of the fox you could create a fill easily with "add shapes" and break.

Also, I think I've accidently found another way to create a filled unclosed object, because I did not use "join shapes" but only the shape editor itself and I ended up with an filled unclosed object too. It was rather unexpected.

[handrawn]

with xara, I would usually do it the way Bob does it in the video you linked - I am a cartoonist too, and Bob has clearly demonstrated this method which suits cartooning well

there is no reason to panic about doing it the way Eric shows - just don't include the filled unclosed shapes in any groups and don't edit any filled unclosed shapes afterwards and it should be ok - it might be fine anyway.. but when I have the mod hat on I feel the need to point out possible pitfalls and, no, xara ltd would not [be expected to] help with unsupported features - that's what unsupported means in this context

[bcire68]

I agree with everything Steve just said.

No, I don't always do things that way. I tend to do things like Bob does them too (it is pretty handy).

I wouldn't be too frightened about this unsupported feature going away as it has been around for several incarnations of Xara products.

Eric