Learn how to edit path and use the drag to duplicate command in Microsoft Expression Blend 2.


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Video Transcription

There are a few more commands I want to show you with paths. So let me zoom out a little bit. I am just going to double click on the magnifying glass to restore myself to a hundred percent zoom and I am going to create a path that we are going to work with. So let me just grab a simple pen path and you remember when we were taking about creating pen paths, if I wanted to close my path, I could just click on the start point again and the small circle indicates I am about to close my path. But what happens if I change my selection and that is no longer the case? So now, if I wanted to close this path, is there a way to do it? Well, actually, yes there is. I am going to grab my pen tool and I want to move over to one of the end points of my path. When I do that, the pen tool gets a little line next to it. That means I am going to resume editing this path. So when I click, it is not going to delete that point. It will just put me back in the path editing mode. So now, I can continue adding to that point and I also have the ability to click on the end point and close my path. So when you are working with the pen tool, using this technique can allow you to get back into a path and finish modifications even if you have gone out selecting over objects, other tools and so on. Now, there is another new feature that Blend 2 has brought out that was not around in the Blend 1 timeframe and that is the ability to do what is called the drag to duplicate. Let me go ahead and grab my selection tool once again. I am going to put the mouse over this particular object and I am going to hold down the control key. When I do that, you will notice as soon as I move the mouse a little bit, the cursor changes a little to indicate the two arrows. That means that you are in drag to duplicate mode. If I use the left mouse button to simply drag this, I now end up creating duplicates of the object. Now, you will notice when I did this, I made the mistake of having one of my other paths selected. The drag to duplicate can drag either one element or multiple elements. It will simply duplicate anything and everything that is in the current selection set. So let me go ahead and do a select none. You can see that by using the drag to duplicate, I can very quickly create some new shapes, new designs and so on. So this concludes our tour of the various editing tools that you have got to work with your different paths. If you do not have design available or you are just doing a quick edit, you should find that these commands are more than sufficient to put together your designs.