Page 60 - Xara Designer Pro X17

60 Document handling

OUTLINE MODE ONLY. This is now fully anti-aliased for higher quality screen display.
OUTLINE MODE WITH BLEND STEPS.
FULL COLOR (no anti-aliasing).
HIGH QUALITY (full anti-aliasing and image smoothing)
VERY HIGH QUALITY Bi-cubic photo display considerably improves the quality of
scaled down photos.
The default quality level is VERY HIGH QUALITY which means the document is displayed on
screen exactly as it will be printed (except that the monitor is lower resolution than a
printer.) Anti-aliasing gives a much smoother and more accurate screen display,
especially when displaying small details. However, one of the consequences is that
sometimes objects can look slightly blurred.

FULL COLOR shows the document colored, but with anti-aliasing turned off.

On the OUTLINE MODE setting only the outlines of the shapes appear (they are drawn as
wire frames). This makes it easier to select objects hidden behind other objects.

OUTLINE WITH BLEND STEPS is particularly useful for seeing outlines of the various steps of
a blend.

You can also change these settings with "WINDOW ->
QUALITY". There are toolbar buttons available for the five
quality settings on the Window toolbar (on page 644).
Refer to "Blends (on page 317)" for more on how the quality setting affects the display of
blends.

The constrain key

The "Ctrl" key has a special function in Designer Pro. It constrains the action of the
current operation in some way. For example, normally you can rotate an object to any
angle. But in Designer Pro,if you hold down "Ctrl" while you rotate an object, the rotation
is constrained to a subset of the possible angles. By default the object will rotate only to
multiples of 45 degrees plus any rotations where a significant straight edge in the object
becomes vertical or horizontal.

The black line on the left can be rotated to
any angle within the circle. On the right is
the same line, but with "Ctrl" held down it
can only be rotated to the positions
indicated.

Similarly, constraining a rectangle creates a perfect square and constraining an ellipse
creates a perfect circle. Release "Ctrl", and they will not be constrained.

The constrain angle feature is defined in "FILE" > "PAGE OPTIONS" > "GENERAL" > "ANGLE
CONSTRAINT (ON PAGE 629)"