If you expect to want to do anything to those objects, now or later, consider grouping them (discussed next), even temporarily. That way, they move as one, size as one, fill as one, etc. It’s easy to ungroup them later, but not as easy to reselect all of them again, once you go off and do other things. To select all of the objects in your drawing, you can forget about marquees or Shift+clicks or any of that nonsense and head straight for Edit Ø Select All, where you would then have a choice of all objects, text objects, or just guidelines. Ctrl+A is the new shortcut for selecting all objects. (Well, new shortcut for DRAW, old for Windows.)

If a drawing contains many overlapping objects—or if you ever want to get a better idea of the components of a drawing—a quick trip into Wireframe view would be a good idea. There, only outlines are displayed—no fills. (You toggle Wireframe with View Ø Wireframe.) Figure 3.7 shows two renditions of the same toy (thanks to DRAW’s ability, since version 6, to show two simultaneous views of the same drawing). Notice that it is easier to pick out the individual objects that make up this jack-in-the-box when it is displayed in Wireframe view.

FIGURE 3.7  When you use Wireframe view, it is easy to see the shapes and lines that make up the foundation of your drawing.

Turning Many Objects into One

DRAW offers three commands that, in some fashion or another, take multiple objects and lump them together so you can work with them all at once. When used correctly, each of these commands is enormously helpful in organizing the various elements contained in drawings. The three commands—Group, Combine, and Weld—are found under the Arrange menu. And once you get the objects the way you want them, three commands introduced in DRAW 8—Lock Object, Unlock Object, and Unlock All Objects—enable you to make sure they stay the way you’ve designed them, until you are ready to modify them later.

Grouping Objects

The most straightforward of the three “lump together” functions, Group uses an imaginary paper clip or rubber band to collect a set of objects. In other words, the objects are completely independent of one another; they are just held together so you can move, size, or color them in one step. Grouped objects can always be ungrouped—each maintains almost complete autonomy from the other members of its group. Figure 3.8 includes a set of grouped objects (top-left); notice how the members of this group appear the most autonomous of the three sets.

FIGURE 3.8  The three commands that join objects can produce startlingly different results.

If you apply a fill or an outline to a group, all the objects in the group will receive that fill or outline (except elements that are not closed, which will not be filled).

It’s a good idea to get into the habit of grouping objects after their spatial relationship to one another has been established (you can continue to make changes to objects within a group). The two hotkeys for grouping and ungrouping, Ctrl+G and Ctrl+U, will come in handy.

Another command in the Arrange menu, Ungroup All, enables you to ungroup a collection of grouped items at once.

	TIP You can select an individual object within a group by holding down Ctrl and clicking on the desired object. You’ll know you did it correctly when you see circular handles (instead of square ones) around the object. Once selected, you can edit a “child” object within a group just as if it were outside of a group. In DRAW 9, you can even delete a child within a group.

Combining Objects

Combining gives you a less flexible set of objects than does grouping. First, the objects that are combined lose their individual identities; in other words, rectangles, ellipses, and text characters become generic “curves” after being combined. The individual components still have their shapes and their properties, but they have become attached to one another.

Since combined objects become a single curve, they can have only one outline and one fill. Of all the objects in the combined set, the one selected last determines the outline and fill. Where areas overlap, a hole is created.

The middle image of Figure 3.8 shows the effects of Combine. The sun and the cloud are now one object. Notice where the sun and the clouds intersect—the many overlapping areas create a striking mosaic of filled and hollowed areas.

You can break apart an arrangement of combined objects with the Arrange Ø Break Apart command (or press the hotkey Ctrl+K instead, if you choose). But don’t expect the objects to remember how they used to be. Objects you break apart are just curves, and they each inherit the outline and fill of the combined object before it was broken apart. It’s not terribly significant that a rectangle becomes a curve, because it still looks and acts the same. However, when text is combined with other objects and then broken apart, it loses all of its text properties. It may still look like text because even text characters are actually a collection of curves, but it can never be edited as text again.

Welding Objects

You can take the Weld command literally—it melts separate objects together. In welding, as in combining, the last selected object determines the outline and fill for the new object. Unlike Combine, however, Weld couldn’t care less about the points at which welded objects intersect; Weld removes all overlapping areas. No holes are created, and overlapping objects lose their individual shapes entirely. As Figure 3.8 shows, Weld is determined to turn all selected objects into one big blob, and in so doing, removes all parts of objects that lie inside the new outline. When you use Weld, you perform radical surgery.