How to move group of objects

[Gary Tayman]

I hope I'm not sounding too stupid; I bought XARA for my business, and am so busy that I seldom have time to work on the website. So I don't retain a lot of would-be simple tasks.

Here's what I'm trying to do: I need to add some space in the middle of a page for more comments. For this I need to move everything below it, further down.

There is a way to select the rest of the page as a group. Haven't figured out how.

Then, once selected, I need to move it all downward a little. Haven't figured that out either. Every time I try to select something then move it, it stretches it, compresses it, or rotates it sideways. How do you simply move the block downward?

Thanks!

[Chris M]

Zoom out (ctrl+ mouse wheel) until you can see the section you want to select.
Marquee select (draw a box with your mouse) around all the objects to select.
File > Page Options > Page Size (tab) > Auto-Fit To Page (button)
Deselect the 'Automatic' under Selected Objects Options and select 'Bottom'
Now click anywhere to deselect your marquee, zoom back to where you're comfortable, and adjust the length of your page by dragging.

To undo the edit, marquee the section, follow the steps above and tick 'Automatic'.

[Boy]

When I need to move a collection of objects like that, i marquee them (or select them in the layers gallery) and then softgroup (NOT group) them (Arrange/Apply Soft Group). This helps if you perchance lose the selection as you only have to click one of the softgrouped objects to select all of them. For more precise movement I use the arrow keys (in combination with the Ctrl, Alt and Shift keys); this avoids unwanted issues as you described.

[Gary Tayman]

Thanks -- so far.

I tried the CTL-wheel to zoom, nice feature, just learned something new. But that's where the progress ends. Forget about moving the entire group, just move one text box at a time. I selected the lowermost text box, I've got a blue dotted line around it, but if I pull down on the bottom line it stretches it. If I push down on the top line it shrinks it. If I click the circle above it, it rotates all over. If I CTL+drag, it keeps the text intact but enlarges the box. If I SHIFT+drag, it stretches top and bottom simultaneously. How do I simply MOVE the bloody thing? Yes I've tried the help menu, it got me nowhere.

[Acorn]

The dashed blue bounding box shows what you have selected.
To move the selection, you click-drag on any of its contents (for a text box, this would be a letter).

If you have a selected collection of object then the click drag will keep everything together until you let go and click elsewhere.

If you have a bounding box, you can also use the arrow keys:
Shift+Arrow moves the fastest. Also try with Ctrl+Arrow and Alt+Arrow.

Chris was explaining how to associate the object(s) with the height of the page.
Auto-fit to Bottom means when you lengthen the page height, those object stick to the bottom position regardless.

https://helpandsupport.xara.com/xara...g_objects.html

Acorn

[Gary Tayman]

THANKS! Seems I tried to do this before and it didn't work. It worked this time. Got it updated!

On the one hand I really like the XARA product, and don't want to go back. But it can also be frustrating to do seemingly simple tasks, and since I'm not doing it every day, it often gets tricky. It's an old version and I need to update, but want to wait until I have plenty of time to sit and figure out the new version, fully expecting compatibility issues with my current pages. I'll get to it someday.