Section 118. About Grouping Objects

118. About Grouping Objects

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

115 Create a New Shape

117 About Manipulating Objects

SEE ALSO

119 Align Objects

As you draw objects on your drawing area, Draw keeps track of the order in which you draw them. Draw maintains a logical overlap as you lay one item on top of another. It's obvious, for example, that the rounded square in the middle was the last item placed on the following figure's drawing area and that the rightmost square was the first item placed on the figure because it falls beneath all three of the other objects. Can you tell from the placement which shapes were placed second and third?

Draw maintains the appropriate stacking order as you add shapes to your drawing.

If you want to move an object down the stack or up the stack, just click to select the item, choose Modify, Arrange from the menu, and then choose the appropriate command from the submenu that appears to send the item back into the stack one level at a time, send the item to the very back of the stack, or bring the item forward as much as you want. You can also arrange objects in a stack by clicking the Arrange button on the Drawing toolbar and selecting the appropriate button from the toolbar that appears.

When you press Ctrl+A to select all the objects in your drawing, or when you press Shift and click multiple objects to select them, you then have a group of items. You can move, copy, resize, format, and perform other functions on the objects in a group as if they were one object. A selected group such as this is not permanent, however. As soon as you select another object, the selected group is disbanded. To create a fixed group, select the objects to group and then choose Modify, Group . To later ungroup the objects so that you can perform a task on a single object in the group, choose Modify, Ungroup . To edit the objects in a group without ungrouping them, click the group and choose Modify, Enter Group . Perform your edits on the individual objects as desired, and then choose Modify, Exit Group to return to normal editing, with the objects still grouped.

KEY TERM

Group A set of two or more selected objects in Draw.

When you work with a group as a whole, such as resizing or moving the group, Draw maintains the separate identities of the objects in that group. If you want to combine the items, you can merge the shapes into a single shape that takes on the attributes of the bottom-most object in the stack. The combined shape occupies the combined area of the original shapes, minus areas where the original shapes overlapped . To combine a selected group of objects, select Modify, Combine from the menu. Unlike new shapes you create (see 115 Create a New Shape ), you can split apart combined shapes.

NOTE

Blank areas will always appear where the combined objects originally overlapped.

Combined objects take on the appearance of the lowerrmost object in the stack.

After the objects are combined, you can resize, copy, and move them as a single object. Instead of keeping these objects combined, however, you can uncombine them. By selecting the overall combined object and then selecting Modify, Split from the menu, you can separate the objects out once again, although they stay in their combined locations until you click and drag one of the pieces out. In addition, the separate shapes have all the color, line thickness , and other properties of the bottommost shape before you combined them. Any differentiation in color or other attributes they originally had will be gone when you split the shapes.