Object layout buttons
The two left buttons in this cluster are for grouping and ungrouping Classic Title Editor objects. The first button is available when multiple objects are selected. Its action is to link the objects into a group – a composite object that is treated as a single entity by editing operations. When a group is selected, all its control points are visible simultaneously, and any of them may be used to manipulate the group.
A grouping of three objects
The second button, which is available whenever a group object is selected, separates the group into its constituent objects.
Although it is possible to “group groups”, grouping is always just one level deep, so ungrouping a supergroup will result in all the constituent objects being individuals again.
The next button opens a pop-out menu of 11 operations that apply only to groups. The first six let you align a set of objects along any one of their four edges or either of their two mid-lines. The next pair of commands provides for spacing the objects at equal intervals in either the vertical or horizontal directions, and the final three resize the objects so that they have equal width, equal height, or both. All of these commands are particularly useful in menu creation, since you generally want menu buttons to be laid out in a regular fashion.
The final object layout button opens another pop-out menu, this one concerned with object justification. The nine options here are in a graphical form resembling a tic-tac-toe board. Clicking one of the nine areas moves the object to the corresponding corner of the screen (as defined by the “text-safe” area delimited by red dashed lines), or to the center.
The first step in making a group is to select the multiple objects that will comprise it. This can be accomplished in either of two ways:
· By clicking and dragging with the mouse to mark out a selection rectangle (a “marquee”) that encloses all the objects you want to group; or,
· By clicking the first object you want to group, then Ctrl-clicking each of the others.
Any selection of multiple objects functions as a temporary group, and can be moved, aligned, rotated, colored etc. as a unit. The temporary grouping loses its identity as soon as you click elsewhere in the Edit Window, however, whereas a group created with the group button persists until explicitly ungrouped.