6.01 How to use the drawing tools icon bar

The leftmost vertical icon bar offers you a number of tools to add (graphic) objects, modify a selected area or apply a filter to the entire design. The tools are clustered into groups of similar drawing tools. There are two ways of composing your design: by modifying the bitmap and placing objects in the design.

Drawing tools: manipulating the bitmap
The retouching tools allow you to draw directly in the bitmap, where the lines you draw have a fixed position. The set of filters allows you to change colours or change the as an example the thickness of lines with filters. When you open a saved image file (e.g. a scanned image or an image saved from the internet) it needs to be fused with the bitmap in order to edit the image.

Drawing tools: placing objects
The list of available objects includes lines, squares, circles, triangles and dots, but also more complex objects such as tables and mathematical grids. These are represented in blue, indicating they are not ‘fused with the bitmap’ and can still be changed whenever you wish.
A special category of tools allows you to add text to the design: text labels, mammoth braille and drawing letters and digits. These tools will allow adding text in braille or regular font to highlight certain elements in the design.

Properties in second vertical toolbar
Each tool has its own (second) vertical icon bar that will appear when you select a drawing tool or select the object (again) that was created with the tool. Most objects have some properties in common, such has position and size, whereas some other functions are specific for the tool or object.

See: Editing object properties.