Using specialized drawing tools
Several specialized drawing tools let you quickly create complex
shapes in Canvas. Drawing grids, stars, polygons, concentric circles,
cubes, spirals, and Smart Lines is as easy as drawing rectangles.
The tools shown in the following table create specialized vector
objects.
In most cases, you can treat these vector objects like all others. You
can move them and resize their bounding boxes. They can be rotated,
flipped, and scaled. You can apply strokes, pen inks and fill inks to
them. However, most of these objects are compound objects, which
means that they are made up of separate objects. Because of this,
some inks and other effects appear differently when applied to these
objects than to simple vector objects like rectangles and ovals.
Some of the specialized objects have unique editing features. For
example, you can twirl the points of a star, star outline, or framed star
by dragging special handles. You can also specify the number of
points of a star, the number of rows and columns in a grid, the num-
ber of rings in concentric circles, and the number of revolutions in a
spiral. You can draw a cube with or without a perspective effect.
Methods for drawing and modifying all of the specialized objects
appear with the individual tool descriptions on the following pages.
You can also convert most specialized vector objects to paths. Doing
this lets you edit the objects anchor points and segments. For more
information, see Converting objects and text to paths on
page 23.441.
Use this tool
to draw this
Concentric Circles
Nested circles or ovals
Cube
Square and rectangular boxes in iso-
metric views
GridMaker
Rows and columns of boxes
Multigon
Stars and complex polygons
Smart Lines
Linked lines for flow charts, diagrams
Spiral
Lines in spiral patterns