(upbeat music)
- [Instructor] With Graphics Editor organized,
we're ready to add some basic objects to the page.
These are located in our toolbar here,
and in general, all operate in the same way.
Let me start with a simple rectangle.
I can set some of the properties
in the second-level tool bar,
but I'll show you even more in a moment.
I'll click and drag to create the rectangle,
or I can single-click to start the rectangle
and click again to end it; either way works.
Holding shift will create a square instead.
Once done, I can quickly create another one,
or I can press Esc to end the Rectangle tool
and return to Select.
This also leaves my last object selected,
and I can now drag it around the page,
or drag the corners to resize it.
At the top of the page,
I can snap my objects to a grid
that I'm able to customize and show.
With the Select tool active,
I can group multiple objects together,
align them,
move them in front of or behind other objects,
or distribute them evenly.
There are also tools to flip, resize, rotate,
or skew objects.
Over in the object tree, I have created two rectangles.
Clicking on either of these
selects it in the Properties pane below.
The tree also serves as my object ordering.
The lowest object on the page is at the top of the tree,
and objects below sit on top of it.
I can reorder these with the arrow buttons.
We'll see other ways to organize objects in the tree later.
Down in the Properties,
I see all the characteristics of my object
that can be configured.
The ID and Name don't do anything for me now,
but are useful for accessing the object from a script.
Most of the Appearance properties
are the same ones we could set in the toolbar,
but I can also reduce its opacity
to see the objects behind it,
or hide it entirely,
which is useful in scripting and animations.
Last in the properties,
I can manually adjust the position and size of my object.
The left and top positions are in pixels
from the left and top of the page.
RadiusX and RadiusY refer to the size of a circle
rounding the corners.
Finally, the height and width are also measured in pixels.
These are the standard properties of rectangles,
and I recommend you familiarize yourself
with the other objects.
The Curve object is a Bezier curve
that can be modified as most other tools do.
The Text object will have some different properties
dealing with the font,
and the text itself is in the Content property.
The Textbox is similar, but has a fixed-size box,
whereas Text automatically resizes itself.
A Picture object also stores raw data
in its Content property.
The last object to show you
is the Tgml at the top of the tree.
The page itself also has some properties,
like the background color
and the page size.
One other thing to mention
is that we can create custom properties for objects
by right-clicking in the whitespace of the Properties menu
and selecting Add.
This is just an attribute name with some value.
Like so many other properties here,
this is mostly used in scripting,
but we will be doing this a bit later.
With that,
I think we've covered the basics
of managing graphical objects.
Please take some time to lay out a page,
and in the next video we'll take the next step
and modify some of these properties
beyond what these fields allow us.
Until then, thank you.