Filling Unclosed Shapes !!!

[ivan louette]

Those who work with Illustrator and Freehand may be (only a little bit) frustrated because they don't find the ability to fill non closed vector shapes in Xara or Xara X. Nevertheless this is possible in only three steps:

1°-select your open shape(s) (here the five curves) toghether with a closed shape which has the filling you want to use (here the quadrangle with circular filling);
2°-go to "Arrange" and Join shapes;
3°-go again to "Arrange" and now Break shapes.

The filling is miraculously preserved and you can delete the closed shape, move and edit each shape separately like in Illustrator, ...but with all the marvellous things of Xara X !!!

I am sure I am not the first to find it but this is not well documented in Xara X help about filling. Nevertheless I have tried it with color fills, bitmap fills and ClipView, and it works in any case !!!

Regards,

ivan

p.s. see also the other topic "Repeating Shapes for Vector Fills".

[This message was edited by ivan louette on December 25, 2000 at 05:14 AM.]

[ivan louette]

Those who work with Illustrator and Freehand may be (only a little bit) frustrated because they don't find the ability to fill non closed vector shapes in Xara or Xara X. Nevertheless this is possible in only three steps:

1°-select your open shape(s) (here the five curves) toghether with a closed shape which has the filling you want to use (here the quadrangle with circular filling);
2°-go to "Arrange" and Join shapes;
3°-go again to "Arrange" and now Break shapes.

The filling is miraculously preserved and you can delete the closed shape, move and edit each shape separately like in Illustrator, ...but with all the marvellous things of Xara X !!!

I am sure I am not the first to find it but this is not well documented in Xara X help about filling. Nevertheless I have tried it with color fills, bitmap fills and ClipView, and it works in any case !!!

Regards,

ivan

p.s. see also the other topic "Repeating Shapes for Vector Fills".

[This message was edited by ivan louette on December 25, 2000 at 05:14 AM.]

[Ross Macintosh]

Very interesting Ivan. I tried the technique and found it accepts the shadow tool effects and feathering. Bevel and contour don't apply "properly". They apply their effects to the unclosed line only. You'll also find the "combine shapes" operations won't give you the expected results - that is unless you expected them to fail!

Still I think the ability to fill an unclosed shape will at times be useful. Thanks Ivan for pushing the boundries.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[lucx]

Yet another hidden Xara feature I wasn't aware of. Do keep posting them when you find them. I experimented and this technique works all the way back to version 1.2 (and probably 1.0 for that matter).

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Ivan
This is a feature I was unaware of until your posting. One thing to notice though is if you zoom in the line appears were there is'nt a line and it takes on the line attribute colour .When I tried it there was no line until a 500% zoom level was chosen. The line then took on the normal attribute(ie line width)of the line. It must be a hairline width that does'nt appear under normal circumstances. I'm not sure if the line would print.
Do you find the same if you zoom in?
Egg

[ivan louette]

Hello Egg,

Yes I saw a line when zooming on the selected shape if that was a small one, but at this time my printer is out and I coudn't try if this line prints or not. That would be interesting to try printing with different kind of brush strokes.

Kindly yours,

ivan

[xrenex]

Ivan,

Great discovery [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

But you have to admit that your "repeating shapes for vector fills" aren't quiet the same as vector fills. I mean vector fills working the same way as bitmap fills do now.
BTW a more flexible and natural way for creating repeating shapes is using the Blend Tool.

At this moment the nearest alternative for vector fills is using a bitmap copy with true colour and alpha. It is almost the same, but still...

[Budash]

There is a good russian proverb: " New is a well forgot old "
Filling unclosed shapes by that way, which one you have described, was present in Хara from the version 1.1.
There is also interesting feature of this trick (bug?): at increase of a scale is higher than 400%, the line aggregating an extremities of the open shape becomes above visible!
This feature is present at all versions,switching on and Xara X.

[amoore]

I thought my graphics card was screwing up when I got the lines again doing the chrome pretzel thing.

A couple of years ago, I had no end of trouble trying to do Gary's stained glass tutorial because every time I zoomed in, I found myself working on lines that didn't exist when I zoomed out.

I'd really like to see this particular bug squashed. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]