Projects are a way to allow you to set and save your preferred work environment. A project is composed of three parts: the document window, the floating palettes, and the preferences settings.
1.1 The File Menu
For every document, a project remembers the location of the file on your disk, the front-to-back stacking order of your windows, the location of your windows on the screen, the view of your document in the document window, and all of your Preferences settings.
All documents are opened and saved using standard file commands in the File menu. These are New, Open, Close, Save, and Save As. Revert to Saved changes the current document back to its last saved version. When you choose Revert to Saved, all changes that you have made to a document since the last time you saved it will be removed.
The Exchange command closes the active document window, prompting you to save your changes if necessary, and replaces it with another document of your choosing. Using Exchange is the same as choosing Close and then choosing Open.
1.2 The Project Menu
The Project menu is made up of four parts:
1. Two submenus that list and allow you to open available Library and Tutorial files.
2. Menu items that manage your project files.
3. Menu items that control the working environment.
4. A list of the open documents.
Open Project closes the current project and all open files, prompting you to save when appropriate, then allows you to select a different project to open. The Open Project dialog that appears when you choose Open Project contains an Open as Untitled checkbox. Selecting this option opens your project as a template document complete with your document defaults, preferred window and palette arrangement, and the frontmost document will be an Untitled drawing window.
When opening a project, ShareDraw attempts to locate and open all documents that make up that project. To do this, ShareDraw looks first in the folder in which it found the project file. If it doesn’t find a document there, it will then look for it in the folder where it was last saved.
Save Project saves all documents and the project. A black diamond in front of the Save Project menu item indicates that a change has been made to a document in the project since the project was last saved.
Save Project As brings up a Save As dialog which allows you to name the project and save all files. A checkbox option allows you to copy all documents into the same folder as the project.
Close All closes all documents and the project file.
Project Info is a dialog that provides information on the number of objects and the file size for all open documents in the project.
Preferences is a dialog that lets you customize ShareDraw to your preferred working style. The values you choose in Preferences are always saved when you save your project file. If you do not always use projects, you may want to create a preferences file that will be used whenever you start ShareDraw. To do this:
1. Open the Preferences dialog and select your preference options.
2. Click OK.
To learn more about the various options in the Preferences dialog, turn on the Help facility by choosing ShareDraw Help from the Tool menu before you open the Preferences dialog.
Note: ShareDraw Help is always open in an unregistered copy of ShareDraw.
Cleanup Windows allows you to select various ways to arrange your open windows.
The Project menu also lists all open document windows. A black diamond to the left of a document name indicates that changes have been made to that document since it was last saved. Choosing a document name from this menu makes it the active document.
More Memory opens a dialog that shows available application memory and some buttons that you can use to help free up some memory, should it ever become necessary.
If you find that you are frequently running out of memory while working with ShareDraw, you may want to increase the amount of memory available to the application. This is called increasing the application memory partition. To do this:
1. Quit ShareDraw.
2. In the Finder, click on the ShareDraw icon once to highlight it.
3. Choose Get Info from the Finder File menu.
4. You will see a Preferred size value. You can increase this value in the Finder Get Info window to give the ShareDraw application more memory in which to run.
1.3 Libraries and Tutorials
A library can be any ShareDraw document that you use as a resource for other drawings. You can use a library to store collections of objects or frequently used graphics such as company logos. You can also use a library to store frequently used graphic attributes such as custom patterns, textures, or gradients.
Tutorials are ShareDraw documents that provide additional help with learning more about the various ShareDraw features.
The Libraries and Tutorials submenus in the Project menu let you quickly access the available Libraries and Tutorials.
When you launch ShareDraw, the submenus are created by listing all of the files and folders found in the “Tutorials” and “Libraries” folders. These folders must be located in the same folder as the ShareDraw application. Any ShareDraw document can be used as library.
Hint: To prevent a file located in the Libraries or Tutorials folder from appearing in the submenu, make the first character in the file name an underscore character. For example: “_No Library”
When a library file is opened from the Libraries submenu, the open document windows are repositioned and the Library window is automatically positioned to the right the document windows.
There are three special tools that are useful— especially when working with Library documents. These are the Copy tool, the Replace tool, and the Grab Attributes tool. These tools and their use are described in Chapter 7 “More Draw Features.”
1.4 Export
The Export submenu, in the File menu allows you to save your ShareDraw document in either PICT or EPSF format.
When you choose to export a file as EPSF you can elect to save it in EPSF format with a PICT preview or as Type TEXT. The EPSF, with PICT is for use on Macintosh computers. It includes a PICT preview of the PostScript description of the document for screen display. Use Type TEXT when you want to use your EPSF file on non-Macintosh systems.
