Page 158 - Xara Designer Pro X17

158 Drawing Lines and Shapes

High Pressure Low Pressure

To draw a variable width stroke using your tablet:
1. Enable pressure sensitive drawing by pressing the ENABLE/DISABLE PRESSURE
RECORDING button on the Freehand tool InfoBar.
2. Clear the current selection (click an empty part of the canvas, or press Escape).
3. Choose a suitable line width from the line width dropdown list on the top bar. The
width you select will be the width of the line that is drawn when you are applying
maximum pressure.
4. An alert appears asking if you want to make the selected line width the default for
new objects. Press the Set button to confirm.
5. Start drawing using your tablet device. Vary the pressure as you draw to vary the
line width accordingly.

There is a special entry in the stroke shape dropdown list on the InfoBar entitled
"Pressure" to indicate that the selected line has a custom profile. To convert a pressure-
drawn line into an ordinary stroke simply choose an alternative stroke profile from the list.
This deletes all the pressure data that was recorded for the stroke.

Brush styles
The FREEHAND & BRUSH TOOL can also be used to apply different brush stroke styles
along the path of the line. Instead of being a solid, fixed-width line, you can change it to
be a variable-width line, or one of a huge range of fancy brush styles, like airbrush, felt tip
marker, and many more. See Brushes (on page 173) for more details.

The Straight Line & Arrow tool

This tool makes it easy to draw single segment straight lines and to add arrow heads and
tails to any lines in a way that is much easier and more powerful than doing the same
thing with the LINE GALLERY (on page 171).
Drawing & editing straight lines

Simply click and drag on the page to draw a straight line. You can click on any existing
line to select it, and once selected you can click-drag on either end to move the end of
the line around.