Using specialized drawing tools Several specialized drawing tools let you quickly create complex shapes in Canvas. Drawing grids, stars, polygons, concentric circles, cubes, spirals, and Smart Lines is as easy as drawing rectangles. The tools shown in the following table create specialized vector objects. In most cases, you can treat these vector objects like all others. You can move them and resize their bounding boxes. They can be rotated, flipped, and scaled. You can apply strokes, pen inks and fill inks to them. However, most of these objects are compound objects, which means that they are made up of separate objects. Because of this, some inks and other effects appear differently when applied to these objects than to simple vector objects like rectangles and ovals. Some of the specialized objects have unique editing features. For example, you can twirl the points of a star, star outline, or framed star by dragging special handles. You can also specify the number of points of a star, the number of rows and columns in a grid, the num- ber of rings in concentric circles, and the number of revolutions in a spiral. You can draw a cube with or without a perspective effect. Methods for drawing and modifying all of the specialized objects appear with the individual tool descriptions on the following pages. You can also convert most specialized vector objects to paths. Doing this lets you edit the objects’ anchor points and segments. For more information, see “Converting objects and text to paths” on page 23.441. Use this tool to draw this Concentric Circles Nested circles or ovals Cube Square and rectangular boxes in iso- metric views GridMaker Rows and columns of boxes Multigon Stars and complex polygons Smart Lines Linked lines for flow charts, diagrams Spiral Lines in spiral patterns
Canvas 8 Help: Drawing basics (13 of 22)                                                            Page #409