Drawing Tools

Free Transform and Subselection Tools

As you mentioned you may draw the rectangle which stays “straight” horizontally on the ground. The same is for Text. Objects can be moved (dragged) to another position but cannot be rotated.

Free Transform tool helps with this task. It’s pictogram at the Tools panel looks like a rectangles with marking dots. If you depress this button and after that select any shape on the stage (it can be line, oval, text, anything) you may “stretch and squeeze” or rotate the shape. Move your mouse after you’ve depressed Free Transform button and reshape or rotate the rectangles, lines or ovals you had previously drawn.

You may use any of four options of the Tool panel – Scale, Rotate and Skew, Distort (that allows by dragging corner marker to change a shape, normally inscribed into rectangle to become inscribed in quadrilateral or trapezoid or Envelope (that adds more dragging markers to the emblazoning rectangle, which you can drag and turn independently to create more complicated shapes).

At the illustration you may see several simple shapes which were transformed by different techniques including example of Envelop Transformation (highlighted with dragging markers)

Here we return to the top of the Tools panel and explore the button with the white arrow pictogram. It is called “Subselection Tool” and is used to distort lines or shapes similarly as doing so with Envelop option of the Free Transform Tool.

If you want apply transformation to the shape (it must be selected) you may also use Menu-Windows-Transform (or Ctrl-T shortcut). The auxiliary property window will appear using which you may manually assign percentage of scaling, degree of rotation or skew.

Next