3. Draw ellipses and circles
You can draw either ellipses
or circles with the Ellipse tool. As with the rectangle tools, you click
the Ellipse tool and then click and drag to draw the shape. Press and
hold the Shift key to draw a perfect circle.
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All shapes are surrounded
by a rectangular bounding box. When you click and drag to draw any
shape other than a rectangle, you are technically drawing the bounding
box, which then contains the shape. Therefore, when drawing ellipses or
circles, you need to imagine a spot outside the circle — the corner of
the bounding box — as your starting point.
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The Properties panel
displays most of the same settings for ellipses and circles as it does
for rectangles. Therefore, you can set solid or gradient strokes and
fills, as shown in Figure 6.
While the End caps, Joint,
and Miter limit settings are still available when drawing ellipses, they
do not have any effect on the shape and can be ignored. As with
rectangles, you can set opacity for strokes, fills, or the entire shape.
You can also set a rotation for ellipses.
4. Drawing lines
You can draw lines using the
Line tool. You can create lines at any angle, but holding the Shift key
while you drag constrains the line to 45-degree increments.
Lines do not have fills, so
you will notice that only the stroke settings are available. As with
other shapes, the stroke can be a solid color or a gradient. The End
caps setting changes the ends of the line to round or square (see Figure 7).
Selecting None for the End caps removes them from the line, in effect
making it slightly shorter. Neither the Joints nor Miter limit have any
effect on lines.
5. Drawing other shapes
The remaining shape tools share a
space on the Tools panel to the right of the Line tool. The default
tool is the Triangle, but you can click and hold your mouse on the tool
to see a menu of other shapes such as Hexagon, Octagon, and Star (as
shown in Figure 8). All four tools have the same setting options.
Like other shapes, you can set
strokes and fills and adjust opacity. On the stroke, the End caps and
Miter limit have no effect. Rounded joints round off the sharp edges on
corners; you can further round the joints by adjusting the Corners
setting.
6. Adding text
Add text to your project
with the Text tool. Click on the artboard and type to create a text box.
After you finish typing, you can switch to the Selection tool and
select the text frame to access the Properties panel for the text (see Figure 9).
From here, you can select a
font, scrub, or type to set the font size, set a color, and make the
text bold or italic. Note that Flash and Flex projects use embedded
fonts. Therefore, you are free to select any font on your system to use
in your project. At the bottom of the Properties panel are settings to
add Strikethrough and underlining to your text.
In HTML, you should not
underline text on your page, as this text will likely be confused with a
hyperlink. The same theory should keep you from underlining text merely
for emphasis in Catalyst. Hyperlinked text in Catalyst will not
automatically become underlined; therefore, it can be useful to inform
the user that a particular block of text is a hyperlink.
NOTE
The only unit of measurement available in the Flex framework to size fonts is pixels.
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Inline
formatting of text is not supported by the Flex framework and is
therefore not possible in Catalyst. This explains why the text
properties are only available when the entire text frame is selected and
not available when you select a portion of the text using the Text
tool. |
