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]

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

[rssk]

Thanks very much. I wasn't aware of the alt X & alt Z shortcuts. The shift + F8 for push & shift + F7 for zoom were definitely a pain to use, especially after becoming used to Photoshop's H & Z shortcuts.

Cheers

Roger

[gwpriester]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>An apparently undocumented feature is that the four zoom buttons that temporarily appear on the Infobar can be operated using the right mouse button. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Unless I'm missing something Sean, you can also use the Left mouse button with the four zoom icons. What is it you are doing with the right mouse button?

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[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]

[Sean Sedwards]

Gary

On my version of Xara 2, the four zoom buttons that temporarily appear when you hold down ALT-X or ALT-Z can't be worked with the left mouse button. This does not apply if you use ALT-Z / X to permanently select the tool (i.e. ALT-Z then release ALT first). I normally ALT-Z while I'm using another tool, then release to go back. My normal action (without thinking) is to release the Z before the ALT, but maybe others do this differently.

Tad

Some of the keyboard shortcuts work by deliberate accident and aren't specifically intended, so are undocumented. That is, blocks of code are designed to be reused by different parts of Xara which then inherit the shortcuts of the original block. An example of this is holding down SHIFT when you Create a bitmap copy, which pastes the copy onto the original by apparently inheriting the properties of CTRL+SHIFT+V. I don't have a list, but Xara should take note and include them in the help file, even if they are unintended. After all, a feature is a feature is a feature...

The Bitmap Effects colour reduction seems to have a size limit of about 4.3 Mb, regardless of the amount of system memory you have. The code for this tool may have been written at a time when that was thought to be a big bitmap and perhaps explains why Xara wanted to get rid of the Bitmap Effects (remember the old thread asking whether anybody used the Bitmap Effects?). With the standard version of Xaradraw.DLL and plenty of RAM, Xara has a general bitmap limit of 48 Mb (i.e. 4096 x 4096 pixels). The 19 Mb limit I talked about only refers to systems with 32 Mb RAM.

Regards - Sean

[This message was edited by Sean Sedwards on August 17, 2000 at 01:58 AM.]

[This message was edited by Sean Sedwards on August 17, 2000 at 02:10 AM.]

[michaelward]

What's all this talk of "the standard version of XARADRAW.DLL". Is there another version. If so, how do I get hold of it and what does it do?

I hope I'm not asking a really stupid question... but it has me intrigued

Wod

[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

[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.