11. Editing Points
Now that you’ve been playing around with the Draw tools, take a look at your main window. It probably is a mess with freehand curves splattered across the main window and rectangles and circles littered around the screen. But don’t fret. The purpose of this chapter is to help straighten out this mess by showing you how to edit the individual points.
Before you can edit any of the objects strewn across the vector layer, you first need to be able to select the exact points that you want to work with. The Tools palette and the Edit menu include several tools and commands to help you select exactly the right points. After the right points are selected, you can delete the selected points and curves, change the curvature leading into and out of a point, and transform the various points.
Transforming points is more than just moving the points around; it also involves scaling and rotating a group of points around a specific point. This can be really handy if you need to reduce the size of a circle quickly. Simply scaling all four corner points will accomplish the task instead of moving each point individually.
Another handy way to move points around is to use the Snap to Grid feature. This feature causes the moved points or newly created points to align on the grid intersections, resulting in perfectly straight lines and right angles. Glancing again at your main window, it is obvious that you need some help, so let’s get this editing points thing figured out.