Working Environment

CuteDraw is a multi-window environment, that allows you to work with several documents at a time. It has a large number of toolbars and floating dialogs which make creating vector drawings, schemes and diagrams convenient and fast.

 

Working Environment: Windows, Toolbars and Libraries

When you launch CuteDraw, the document window will come up, with the main menus, several toolbars and a black document.

The user can re-arrange and customize toolbars; however, we will use the default toolbar settings for the purpose of this exercise.

The Tools toolbar is located in the left part of the document window and contains the main tools for drawing and editing shapes and their text.

At the top of the document window you can see the main program menu and all or some of the following toolbars: Standard toolbar - for working with document files (opening, saving, printing, copy/paste commands and other), Format toolbar - for working with line and fill colors and styles and other, the OLE toolbar used to insert most useful OLE objects, the Zoom toolbar that is used to increase/decrease the zoom level in the document.

Align and Distribute toolbars are located in the bottom of the document window are used to align and distribute shapes.

Library pane, Style pane and Sample pane are located in the left of the document window.

By default, the grid is displayed for more convenient and precise drawing. It can be disabled from the View / Grid menu.

By choosing the Rectangle tool you can draw a rectangle in the document, using the mouse. Press and hold down the mouse button, and drag the mouse across the page to draw a rectangle of the desired size and form. On releasing the mouse button, the rectangle will appear. To select the rectangle, switch to the Selection tool and click somewhere on the rectangle. To deselect it, click away from the rectangle. To move the rectangle to some other place, click and hold the mouse button on it, drag it to the needed location and then release the mouse button.

When you are in the select mode, you can resize the rectangle by dragging the corresponding resize handle.

To remove the selected shape, press the Delete key.

If you double-click the rectangle, or press letter key when the rectangle is selected, the text editing mode will turn on. Each shape can have text. The text editing mode will also turn on automatically if you start typing when the shape is selected.

If you press and hold the CTRL when dragging a shape, you will drag a copy of the shape instead of the original shape. You can carry the copy to the needed location and release the mouse button to drop it there.

Besides, the selected shape can be moved with the keyboard (the arrow keys).

If you click on a resize handle of a selected shape, the resize handle will get selected and you can use the arrow keys to move the resize handle and reshape the shape by doing so.

For information about the Library Pane, please read Working with Libraries, Libraries.
About the Drawing Tools toolbar, please read Tools toolbar, Drawing and Editing Shapes.
About the Main toolbar, please read Standard toolbar.
About the Formatting toolbar, please read Format toolbar.
About the Align toolbar, please read Align toolbar, Aligning and Distributing Shapes.
About the Distribute toolbar, please read Distribute toolbar, Aligning and Distributing Shapes.

About the OLE toolbar, please read OLE  toolbar, OLE Objects.

About the Zoom toolbar, please read Zoom toolbar, Zooming and Scrolling Pages.
About operations on shapes and texts, please read Working with Shapes and Text.