Home > Transformations > Resetting and committing transforms

Resetting and committing transforms

Each time you move, rotate, scale, or skew an object, Expression Design remembers its original shape and geometry. This means that if you draw a rectangle and then move and rotate it, Expression Design lets you return the shape back to its originally-drawn geometry, even if you save the document, close it, and reopen it later. Understanding how Expression Design saves transformations on top of the original geometry can be very helpful when manipulating objects to create particular effects.

Reset transformation

To remove all of the transformations applied to a path or shape, point to Transform on the Arrange menu, and then click Reset Transform. The object will revert back to its "pure geometrical state," that is, the state before any transformations were applied to it.

Image fills that you have transformed with the Fill Transform tool are also reset (the transformations are removed) when you click Reset Transform.

Reset Bounding Box

To update an object's underlying geometry, that is, to merge the transformations with the object itself so that Expression Design forgets the original shape, point to Transform on the Arrange menu, and then click Reset Bounding Box.

In many cases, an object will appear unchanged when you choose Reset Bounding Box. However, in some cases, the appearance of brush strokes applied to an object might change radically. For example, when you non-uniformly scale or skew an object that has a stroke, the stroke appears thicker in some areas and thinner in others. The stroke has been transformed along with the underlying path. However, when you choose Reset Bounding Box, the transformation is forgotten (because it was merged into the underlying shape), and the stroke is applied untransformed to the path.

The original object (top left). After scaling, the brush stroke is affected (middle). After choosing Reset Bounding Box, the stroke is applied untransformed to the path (right).

Similarly, let's say you apply a 20-point brush stroke to an object, and then scale that object down uniformly to 50%. The stroke width meter in the Properties panel remains set at 20 points, even though the stroke now appears to be 10 points thick (because the stroke is 20 points x 50% = 10 points). If you choose Reset Bounding Box, the stroke is truly scaled down 50% along with the object size, and the Properties panel now displays a stroke width of 10 points.

After you choose Reset Bounding Box, the Reset Transform feature no longer has any effect (until you apply new transformations to the object).

If you want Expression Design to automatically commit the transform each time you change an object (so that it never remembers the original shape), you can select the Automatically commit transforms option in the General panel of the Options dialog box. This will make the stroke width meter in the Properties panel always display the true width, but would sacrifice the capability of non-uniformly transforming stroke widths.