Designer Pro 6 -- mask mode

[William Wagner]

For some reason, I'm not able to get my Mask Mode button "turned on" -- the Help section pointed to "Window > Mask mode on" -- but even though a shape / object / photo is selected, mask features always remain unavailable. I'm probably stupidly missing something . . .
Thanks.

[steve.ledger]

No object needs to be selected to enable the Mask.
Once the mask button is pressed the screen turns pink right? Now draw a selection with one of the drawing tools. Once this is done you can apply edits to the masked area.
See Help section Operations That Use The Mask

Xara's masking tool is not like Photoshop's or other bitmap editors.

[William Wagner]

Hi, sledger:
Aha . . . I was working on an animation (geometry issues for some kids), and wanted to chop up a few triangles so they could "see" trigonometry in action. Now I understand that I need to create my chops in a DRAWING, then import them to simply use within the animation -- well, I admitted to sometimes being a bit obtuse. So thanks for the hint.
--William