Undocumented temporary zoom feature

[Sean Sedwards]

Most of you are probably familiar with the very useful ALT-Z keyboard shortcut to temporarily select the zoom tool and ALT-X to temporarily select the push tool. An apparently undocumented feature is that the four zoom buttons that temporarily appear on the Infobar can be operated using the right mouse button.

Regards - Sean

[Sean Sedwards]

Xara comes with two versions of a graphics support library called GDRAW.DLL - Xaradraw.DLL and Xdlarge.DLL. Xaradraw.DLL is the default library optimised for speed but limited to bitmaps 4096 x 4096 pixels. Xdlarge can handle larger bitmaps but is marginally slower. If you need to handle giant bitmaps, simply rename Xdlarge.DLL as Xaradraw.DLL.

Regards - Sean

[tad]

Thanks for the Alt-Z shortcut. (hey, I just rediscovered the "spacebar" trick)...Since Gary beat me to asking you about the right-mouse-button thing, I'll ask two different questions:<UL TYPE=SQUARE><LI>You got a list of these "undocumented shortcuts ?? Xara's help file gives the documented ones.<LI>Your experiments seem to show that Xara zonks at about 19meg on a bitmap. How does that relate to the "color reduction-16 color diffusion" variety? I think there may be some PIXEL limit, but pixels is pixels is pixels is megabytes, right? (wrong?)[/list]
Regards.....Tad [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

[tad]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> *Presumably you know about the credits screen? How many of you have seen the error message "Help help I'm trapped in a stately home?"*
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
I have yet to see the credits screen or that great error message. How can we view them????
Regards,,,,,Tad [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

[Sean Sedwards]

This is a mock-up of the "Help! Help! ..." message box that I posted in the previous forum - I've never seen it under real conditions. I once asked if there were any Easter eggs in Xara and apart from this message, the only other suggestion was the "About CorelXARA" box which has animated coloured lines every second time you call it from a single session. Perhaps that's what Justin is referring to.

Regards - Sean

[justin_flude]

1. A right click is just a shifted left click - and that's _policy_. The program assumes just one mouse button because a long time ago it was going to be ported to the Mac.

2. Have you guys tried right-clicking on the custom scrollbars? Doucle-clicking on the corner gadget between them dumps out stuff in debug builds (you'll never know)

3. There's actually quite a lot of undocumented features, most of which don't work properly or do very much except for debugging or adding compatibility with other programs - that's why they are undocumented. Try looking through the ini / registry at the program's options. Don't worry about screwing up your settings as they are constrained to sensible values. Eg. there is a undocumented setting which does radial drag boxes in the zoom and selector. Another controls the initial placement and z-order of view windows. If there's enough interest I might make the effort to "document" them all here now I've flown the nest (and earlier escapees haven't done so AFAIK)

4. Presumably you know about the credits screen? How many of you have seen the error message "Help help I'm trapped in a stately home?"

[amoore]

>How many of you have seen the error message "Help help I'm trapped in a stately home?"

But that was a year ago, and I don't recall whether I got it because I committed the error or because I followed instructions posted in this forum. <BG>

BTW, I continue to use the icon of the stately home as my Xara desktop identifier.

[Sean Sedwards]

I just realised that the spacebar is smarter than I thought and the temporary zoom and push are just as smart. They work so intuitively, I hadn't noticed how they were adapting to the way I used them.

Dabbing the spacebar once will allow you to use the pointer tool in the same way that dabbing ALT-Z / X engages the zoom / push tools. Hitting them again sends you back to whatever you were using before. However, if you hold down any of these keys for more than about half a second, Xara will take you back to the previous tool as soon as you release them rather than wait for a second hit, thus saving a keystroke.

Referring to my previous posting, the order which you release the ALT and Z / X keys is probably intended to be ALT last, since this is usual and logical and there is already a means of temporarily locking the zoom / push tools, as described above.

Regards - Sean

[gerryiles]

In CX2 it is 3 ctrl-shift-double-clicks and a double click. In Webster it should be 3 ctrl-double clicks and a shift-double click.

Also you must not close the dialog between them.

Gerry

[justin_flude]

A couple of hints and that's your lot [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

The "stately home" error message - my word, how we laughed when that popped up during an exhibition demo - only appears under very special circumstances. Which unfortunately I can't remember precisely, but it goes something like this: the program has an error message to report such as "some fonts had to be substituted", "do you want to make this the current attribute", or whatever. Simple informational messages count as "errors" in the sense I'm using the term. To report the error, it loads a dialog template from the resources (if you're not familiar with Windows programming this may all be gibberish to you), formats the specific error message into the dialog's static text control, and then displays the dialog. However, if the program should happen to run out of memory after loading the dialog template but before formatting the error message, then the dialog is displayed with the static text control's default wording, as specified in the dialog template. And that just happens to be "Help help we're trapped ..." Now, I can't remember if it's all error dialogs which potentially do this, or just some. Knowing the person who put this message in, and what he worked on, you might like to explore the dialogs associated with the galleries, especially the font and clipart galleries. And beware of the fish.

Credit screen - apologies again, I can't remember exactly how to bring this up, but it goes like this: choose File / Import to bring up the "Import File" common dialog. Holding down Control, Alt, and Shift (I think), double-click on the dialog's background (ie. "client area" to use the Windoze terminology). Cancel the dialog. Go through the cycle again. And then a third time - but this time _don't_ hold down Ctrl-Alt-Shift when double-clicking the client area. If you've done it right you should see a scrolling list of credited programmers (and others). Two problems, though, because the easter egg code hasn't been updated for a number of years: developers who only worked on the program after ~1995 aren't mentioned; the list is scrolled on "idle events" and therefore may flash past at light-speed on newer machines.