|  |  | 4 General Concepts

# 4 General Concepts

After you start up Ipe, you will see a window with a large gray area containing a light yellow rectangle. This area, the canvas, is the drawing area where you will create your figures. The light yellow rectangle is your "sheet of paper", the first page of your document. (While Ipe doesn't stop you from drawing outside the paper, such documents generally do not print very well.)

At the top of the window, above the canvas, you find the following toolbars:

- File tools (new document, load, save, as well as cut and paste),
- Resolution tools (screen resolution selection),
- Page tools (page and view number),
- Color tools (stroke and fill color),
- Line tools (line width, dash style, arrow shape and size),
- Mark and text size settings,
- Snap tools (snapping modes, grid size and angular resolution),
- Mode tools (mode selection).

On the left hand side of the canvas you find a list of the layers of the current page.

All user interface elements have tool tips--if you move the mouse over them and wait a few seconds, a short explanation will appear. For a longer explanation, use the "What's This?" button on the file tools toolbar (it looks like a cursor pointer with a question mark). Press the button, then click with the mouse on any part of the user interface for a short explanation.

The mode toolbar allows you to set the current Ipe mode. Roughly speaking, the mode determines what the left mouse button will do when you click it in the figure. The leftmost five buttons select modes for selecting and transforming objects, the remaining buttons select modes for creating new objects.

Holding the Control key and pressing the right mouse button, by the way, pops up the object attribute menu in any mode.

In this chapter we will discuss the general concepts of Ipe. Understanding these properly will be essential if you want to get the most out of Ipe.

- 4.1 Order of objects
- 4.2 The current selection
- 4.3 Moving and scaling objects
- 4.4 Stroke and fill colors
- 4.5 Line width, line dash pattern, and arrows
- 4.6 Symbolic and absolute attributes
- 4.7 Zoom and pan
- 4.8 Groups
- 4.9 Layers
- 4.10 Mouse shortcuts

|  |  | 4 General Concepts