## Editing shapes

To edit an object, first click on its stroke path to select it.

- If the button is inactive (LOCAL mode, see also Global/local edit-point mode), the selected element is highlighted in green, with its anchor points transforming into small squares (except for groups, where the policy may be altered from group to group, and may be changed by right-clicking on a group, and selecting the Toggle Highlight Mode action).
- If the mode is set to GLOBAL (ie has been activated), the selection is highlighted globally in red. Eight end-points are displayed, which allows you to scale the entire selection content.
- The floating attribute-editor gets updated according to the selected object properties (e.g. fill-colour, stroke thickness, arrows...).

You can move a particular anchor point by clicking on it and dragging the mouse, or you can translate the whole selection by clicking somewhere on a stroke path. When moving a group of object, the clicked object serves as a reference for alignment on the grid.

If you want precise control over the object location, pressing F2 directly pops up a properties panel that lets you alter the object shape using numerical entries rather than the mouse

Tip : clicking on a selected object with SHIFT pressed let you deselect it.

## Multiple selections and groups

You can afford multiple selections either by holding the SHIFT key pressed during the select operation or by "wrapping" objects you want to select in a selection rectangle that you create by dragging the mouse from anywhere on the sheet. Translation and scaling operations are then available using the same rules as in the previous paragraph. You can also group selected objects so that they get linked one to each other, by right-clicking and selecting group item in the popup menu; besides, groups are nestables. To ungroup previously grouped objects, click with the right mouse button somewhere on a selected group to raise the popup menu, then select the ungroup operation.

## Editing arcs angles

You can add or remove geometrical constraints on the editing operation, by holding some modifiers during the mouse displacement. In addition to the combination of modifiers already used by draw-tools, there is an additional modifier, namely CTRL, which allows you to move the two points controlling the angle start and end in the case they should be at the same position as a point controlling the ellipse shape (by default, these last points have a higher priority and are moved first; hence holding CTRL in effect reverses the priority).

## Context menu

Right-clicking on an object raises a popup menu which lets you apply various operations on that object, eg conversion to other shapes, grouping/ungrouping, etc.

The picture below sketches a typical popup menu for a Bezier curve. This menu gets also displayed in combination with the following objects:

- Lines
- Closed Bezier-curve/Polygon

There are another four popup menus, which are shown in the table below along with their associated objects.

| smooth Polygon closed smooth Polygon
| interpolating curve closed interpolating curve
| rectangle parallelogramm
| ellipse pie arc chord sheared ellipse sheared pie sheared arc sheared chord

These items have the following meaning (depending on the context and the current selection, some items may be grayed, i.e., inactive):

Edit geometry...
  Displays the geometrical properties of the corresponding object in a popup-window
Close path
  turns the shape into a closed one
Convert to Bezier curve
  turns the object into a Bezier curve being as close as possible to the original object
Make all points smooth
  see drawing or editing a curve ...
Make all points symmetric
  see drawing or editing a curve ...
Make all segments straight
  see drawing or editing a curve ...
Straighten this segment
  see drawing or editing a curve ...

to back
  Since pictures are built up in a sequential way, recently drawn objects may hide previous ones (in other words, objects are drawn on the canvas in ascending z-axis order). This item allows you to move the selected object to the lowest z-axis plane, thereby making it possible for ALL other objects to hide it.
backward
  move the selected object one step down the z-axis, so that it may now be hidden by the object it was previously hiding.
forward
  move the selected object one step up the z-axis, so that it may now sit on top of the object that was previously hiding it.
to front
  move the selected object to the highest z-axis plane

View LaTeX file
  displays the LaTeX-formatted file generated from the whole drawing (not the selected object).
Edit Bounding Box
  This item makes it possible to edit the actual bounding box by hand. Available entries are the lowest and highest x-coordinate (resp. y-coordinate). This proves especially useful whenever one or more objects (in particular, text boxes) happen to stick out of the automatically computed bounding box.

## Changing attributes

Graphical attributes, e.g. line thickness, fill colour, etc... can be changed by first selecting objects of interest, then changing fields values in the floating Attribute Editor palette. The set of available attributes is tightly related to PSTrick parameters, since this LaTeX package offers the widest range of possilibites. Refer to the PSTricks documentation for further details.

As a result, depending on the current content-type, some attributes aren't displayed, though they can be changed in the Attribute Editor. In particular, the LaTeX picture environment content-type supports only a very limited subset of all the attributes available in the palette (e.g. no colour, no texture, only simple arrows, no shadow,...). If you'd like to use the whole range of graphical attributes offered by the palette, including shadows, texture and colour filling (more on filling shapes), or fine-grained dashing, you should really think of switching to the PSTricks content-type, and add an \usepackage{pstricks.sty} in your LaTeX files. You won't regret it !