The art board has two painting regions, one on the left by default that contains the interactions palate and one on the right that contains the project properties and resource palettes. Each of these palettes by clicking on the icon can be dock so they can be moved around and with one click restored to their home.
Depending on your preference under tools in the Options menu, you can choose to change the work space to zoom. This value increases or decreases the size of all the palettes to make them easier to see or perhaps smaller to give you more room on the art board. I am going to increase my size a little bit to make things a little bit easier to see.
When you are working with the art board, sometimes you need a little more space. The tab key will cause all of the palettes to be hidden to give your art board as much space as possible. The tools are still visible on the left and the property inspector is still visible. You just cannot see it right now because I do not have anything selected. The tab key also brings these controls back.
The large art board in the middle of the scene is where you are going to do most of your work. There are few controls at the button to help you create elements and help you get a quicker layout. I am going to draw a rectangle on the scene for starters. You will notice I can simply click and drag to get the rectangle of the size I want and adorner should display to show me the height and width so I can get the particular size I am interested in.
As soon as I released the mouse button, the editing handles are brought up so I can then resize, rotate or do any of the other editing commands. By pressing Ctrl Z, I can undo the edits that I just placed because I want my rectangle in the default position for now.
Now, I am going to switch to the selection tool and when I drag the rectangle around when I get closed to the edge of the window, a pink bar is displayed for me to show that at that moment I am now 8 pixels away from the edge of the window. When I draw another rectangle, red lines are displayed to show me when the side of one element matches the sides of another. Then, after switching to the selection tool as I drag the rectangles closer to each other, they will snap to a position that is 4 pixels apart.
All of these tools, the snap lines help me quickly create a layout that I am looking for. If for instance I do not want those I can always hold down the S key to temporarily disabled the snap lines so they do not get my way and then releasing the S key re-enables them. I can also click on the enabler at the bottom to turn them on or off. By default the padding where the amount of space between an element and the edge of the window is set to 8 pixels.
The margins or the amount of space between two rectangles is up to 4 pixels. This values can be changed in the options menu under Tools on the art board tab. I can set this values to whatever I want or turn them on and off. Checking this button is the same functionality as checking the button on the art board. I can also enable or disable the snap grid here, but I can change that on the art board too.
The stamp grid is a more traditional overlay of an 8 pixel grid and by clicking this button I can enable snapping to the grid. So as I draw my rectangle, it will force the geometry to the squares. If I need to pan my art board around instead of switching to the pan tool, I can also hold down the space bar to temporarily use the pan tool to move my art board around.
The mouse wheel also allows me to scroll upward or downward and by holding the control key, zoom in or zoom out. The shift key switches the mouse wheel to zoom in left or right instead of up or down. Changes that I have been making on the art board are creating new elements in setting properties on these elements. What I am actually doing is creating and modifying a sample document.
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