Editing shapes
To edit an object, first click on its stroke path to select it.
-
If the
button
is inactive (LOCAL mode, see also Global/local edit-point mode),
the selected element is highlighted in green, with
its anchor points transforming into small squares
(except for groups, where the
policy may be altered from group to group, and may be changed by right-clicking
on a group, and selecting the Toggle Highlight Mode action).
-
If the mode is set to GLOBAL (ie
has been activated),
the selection is highlighted globally in red.
Eight end-points are displayed, which
allows you to scale the entire selection content.
-
The floating attribute-editor gets
updated according to the selected object properties (e.g.
fill-colour, stroke thickness, arrows...).
You can move a particular anchor point by clicking on it and
dragging the mouse, or you can translate the whole selection by
clicking somewhere on a stroke path. When moving a group of
object, the clicked object serves as a reference for alignment
on the grid.
If you want precise control over the object location,
pressing F2 directly pops up a properties panel
that lets you alter the object shape using numerical entries rather than the mouse
Tip : clicking on a selected object with SHIFT pressed let you deselect it.
Multiple selections and groups
You can afford multiple selections either by holding the
SHIFT key pressed during the select operation or by "wrapping"
objects you want to select in a selection rectangle that you create by
dragging the mouse from anywhere on the sheet. Translation and
scaling operations are then available using the same rules as
in the previous paragraph. You can also group selected objects
so that they get linked one to each other, by right-clicking and
selecting group item in the popup menu; besides, groups are
nestables. To ungroup previously grouped objects, click with
the right mouse button somewhere on a selected group to raise
the popup menu, then select the ungroup operation.
Editing arcs angles
You can add or remove geometrical constraints on the editing operation, by
holding some modifiers during the mouse displacement.
In addition to the combination of modifiers already used by
draw-tools, there is an additional
modifier, namely CTRL, which allows you to move the two points controlling
the angle start and end in the case they should be at the same position
as a point controlling the ellipse shape (by default, these last points
have a higher priority and are moved first; hence holding CTRL in effect
reverses the priority).
Context menu
Right-clicking on an object raises a popup menu
which lets you apply various operations on that object,
eg conversion to other shapes, grouping/ungrouping, etc.
The picture below sketches a typical popup menu for a Bezier curve.
This menu gets also displayed in combination with the following objects:
- Lines
- Closed Bezier-curve/Polygon

There are another four popup menus, which are shown in the table below along with their
associated objects.
 |
- smooth Polygon
- closed smooth Polygon
|
 |
- interpolating curve
- closed interpolating curve
|
 |
|
 |
- ellipse
- pie
- arc
- chord
- sheared ellipse
- sheared pie
- sheared arc
- sheared chord
|
These items have the following meaning (depending on the context and the current
selection, some items may be grayed, i.e., inactive):
-
- Edit geometry...
- Displays the geometrical properties of the corresponding object in a
popup-window
- Close path
- turns the shape into a closed one
- Convert to Bezier curve
- turns the object into a Bezier curve being as close as possible to the original object
- Make all points smooth
- see drawing or editing a curve ...
- Make all points symmetric
- see drawing or editing a curve ...
- Make all segments straight
- see drawing or editing a curve ...
- Straighten this segment
- see drawing or editing a curve ...
-
- to back
- Since pictures are built up in a sequential way, recently drawn objects may
hide previous ones (in other words, objects are drawn on the canvas in ascending
z-axis order). This item allows you to move the selected object to the lowest z-axis plane,
thereby making it possible for ALL other objects to hide it.
- backward
- move the selected object one step down the z-axis, so that it may now be hidden
by the object it was previously hiding.
- forward
- move the selected object one step up the z-axis, so that it may now sit on top
of the object that was previously hiding it.
- to front
- move the selected object to the highest z-axis plane
-
- View LaTeX file
- displays the LaTeX-formatted file generated from the whole drawing (not the selected object).
- Edit Bounding Box
- This item makes it possible to edit the actual bounding box by hand.
Available entries are the lowest and highest x-coordinate (resp. y-coordinate).
This proves especially useful whenever one or more objects (in particular, text boxes) happen to
stick out of the automatically computed bounding box.
Changing attributes
Graphical attributes, e.g. line thickness, fill colour, etc... can be changed by first
selecting objects of interest, then changing fields values in the floating Attribute Editor
palette. The set of available attributes is tightly related to PSTrick parameters,
since this LaTeX package offers the widest range of possilibites. Refer to
the PSTricks documentation for further details.
As a result, depending on the current content-type, some attributes aren't displayed, though they can be changed
in the Attribute Editor. In particular, the LaTeX picture environment content-type supports only a
very limited subset of all the attributes available in the palette (e.g. no colour, no texture, only
simple arrows, no shadow,...).
If you'd like to use the whole range of graphical attributes offered by the palette, including shadows,
texture and colour filling (more on filling shapes), or fine-grained dashing, you should really think of
switching to the PSTricks content-type, and
add an \usepackage{pstricks.sty} in your LaTeX files. You won't regret it !