Pen Tool Tutorial -- a work in progress

[mgeduld]

It's interesting to find out how everyone creates shapes.

Klaus, I agree that you click and drag. The question, for must newbies, is WHICH DIRECTION TO DRAG? and WHY?

I guess that's two questions.

Marcus Geduld
{ email me } { visit me }

[Trekart]

I'd admit to using Xara similarly to how Gary describes.

Almost all of my drawing is done using the Shape Editor tool, and where I need to I use the Freehand tool.

I never ever use the Pen tool - in fact, I don't even have the Pen tool on my icon bar; when I install Xara I always customise the icons to my way of working, which includes removing the Pen Tool!


Stu.

[Klaus Nordby]

Yes, Marcus - I've long been an Expression fan. And yes, XX's brushes are a pain to use in some ways.

K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara

[Luciano]

To Gary,
MS Internet Explorer has a new "function" which automatically reduces bitmap to screen size.
Going with the mouse on top of the reduced image, you should notice a small icon at the right bottom which allows you to enlarge again.

ciao
Luciano

[jclements]

Regards, John

[mgeduld]

It's interesting to hear that so many people like the freehand too. Perhaps Xara should beef it up. Have any of you tried Expression2? Xara is a better app for most vector work, but Expression's freehand tool rocks!

I'd like to see Xara's brushes get a bit easier to use. It would be great to be able to easily save a brush w/o having to save a whole file.

Marcus Geduld
{ email me } { visit me }

[Trekart]

Xara icon bars are very easy to customise. Just choose the Control Bars option from the Window menu, which you no doubt have used to adjust the size/position of the the standard icon bars.

All you need to do is click New..., then scroll to the bottom of the list and turn on the Button Palette. From there you can (using the alt key) drag any icon to your new bar.

I tend to use the default Infobar, Toolbar and Galleries bar, dump the rest and create my own. By saving the Xara BarsNormal registry key from HKCU you can preserve your hard work should you need to re-install in the future.

Stu

[gwpriester]

Marcus

For some reason the tutorial starts out OK and then reduced to fit the screen and everything is too small to see.

I have heard some people complain that Xara's Pen Tool does not work in quite the same way as say Illustrator's Pen tool.

On the other hand, because it is so easy, and so much more intuitive to shape lines with both the Pen Tool and/or the Shape Editor Tool by dragging on the line segment, there does not seem to be much percentage in learning how to draw with Bezier curves.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://www.gwpriester.com">
www.gwpriester.com </a>


XaraXone

[esanabri]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Ernesto:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by John Clements:
Regards, John<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Where exactly on the help... I've been looking and found nothing<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


Found it on the past postings!!!

thank you Stu!

[mgeduld]

Hmm. Looks okay on my screen, but I'll fool around with it and see what I can do.

If the only app you're ever going to use is Xara, you don't necessarily have to learn the pen tool. But many programs rely on it, and Xara DOES have a pen tool.

It doesn't seem that different from Adobe's pen to me, but maybe I'm missing something.

Marcus Geduld
{ email me } { visit me }