Stretching and compressing

[Acorn]

@charliescoffee, your TG Profile declares DP X10, this does not have Smart transform. v15.0 had a nasty Bug that was fixed in v15.1 and beyond; your descriptions so far indicated you are not using v15.0.

The Xara desktop applications have a lot of behaviour baked in and as @handrawn and @PhilM are trying to point out that it is still very easy to think you are methodical but it is too easy to do something to make the process go awry. For instance, Xara's UI approach is quite inconsistent: I think there are only three right-click action in the whole application (Smart transform, Document Tab, top-left Xara icon); meta-key use (Shift, Ctrl, Alt & their combos) varies across Tools; Dialogs can have omissions. All have arisen as the product is complex and has evolved over many years.

We would appreciate you updating your TG Profile.

Acorn

[handrawn]

I get what you're saying the very first time. Perhaps we'll get further if you also read and understand my reply, which is that I've honestly tried your suggestions and very often (but not all the times) they don't work

ok - but that is a bit like saying to an auto-mechanic sometimes my car starts and sometimes it does not - the mechanic would need to look at the car; and maybe, absent a video, someone would have to look over your shoulder whilst you worked to see what was going wrong; not practical - or ask you to log all your actions...

I am really sorry, but we can only work on the information that we are given