Guide · Composition
Place geometry with transforms you can still inspect.
Selection bounds, a movable pivot, mirroring, cloning, and transform baking keep placement reversible until you decide otherwise.
Select on the canvas or in the layer tree.
The selection tool accepts a single drawing or several at once. The layer tree is the second route to the same selection and is usually faster when shapes overlap or sit inside nested groups.
With a selection active, the arrow keys nudge it by one unit and Shift with an arrow key moves it by ten. Consecutive nudges are recorded as one history step rather than one step per key press.
- Single and multiple selection
- Selection from the canvas or the layer tree
- Arrow keys nudge by one unit, Shift by ten
Resize from the selection bounds.
The selection bounds provide the handles for resizing. Because the underlying curves are scaled rather than redrawn, the segment types and node structure of the drawing survive the change.
For an exact size, the geometry panel reports the selection width and height as numbers you can edit instead of dragging.
A future annotated visual will identify the bounds, resize handles, rotation handle, and pivot.
Rotate by handle or by angle.
The rotation handle covers judged rotation. When the angle is known, the rotate dialog takes it in degrees, which is the reliable route for repeated or symmetric arrangements.
Rotation happens around the centre point. That pivot can be dragged to any position and reset to the boundary centre, so a shape can orbit a point that is not its own middle.
- Rotation handle on the canvas
- Rotate by an exact angle in degrees
- Movable centre point with reset to boundary centre
Mirror horizontally, vertically, or across a marked tangent.
Horizontal and vertical mirroring are single commands. They are the common case and need no setup beyond the selection.
The axis mirror tool covers the other case: mark a path segment, and the tangent at the marked point becomes the mirror axis. That makes it possible to reflect across an edge of the artwork itself instead of an imaginary line.
Clone instead of copying through the clipboard.
The clone tool duplicates a selection inside the document. It keeps the work in one undoable stream and does not depend on clipboard permissions or on what another application last copied.
A clone is an independent drawing from the moment it exists, so editing it never reaches back into the original.
Bake a transform when it should stop being a transform.
Node and parent-group transforms accumulate as affine matrices. Baking applies the accumulated matrix to the geometry itself, which is useful before handing the drawing to an operation that should read final coordinates.
A transform that cannot be represented in the geometry is refused, and the affected names are reported. An explicit rejection is preferable to a silently distorted shape.
- Transforms accumulate as 2D affine matrices
- Baking rewrites geometry with the accumulated transform
- Unsupported cases are named and refused