Flash® CS4 for Dummies®

Chapter 4. You Are the Object Editor

In This Chapter

• Selecting objects

• Manipulating objects (moving, copying, deleting, and erasing)

• Reshaping shapes and working with fills

• Transferring properties to other objects

• Transforming objects (scaling, rotating, skewing, and flipping)

• Combining and breaking apart objects

• Changing object order

• Undoing, redoing, and reusing actions

This chapter tells you all you need to know about editing objects. You can manipulate objects in a zillion ways to suit your artistic fancy. The Flash editing tools can give you precisely the results that you want. Sometimes you need to edit because you made a mistake (rarely, of course), but often, editing is just part of the creation process. You might also find that you have to alter imported graphics so that they fit into the scheme of things.

Selecting Objects

Before you can edit any object on the Stage, you need to select it. Flash offers many ways to select objects. After you get the hang of using the Flash selection tools, you'll find them efficient and easy to use.

Selecting with the Selection tool

What defines an object? A shape that includes an outline (also called a line or a stroke) and a fill (such as a filled-in circle) has two objects — the outline and the fill.

Note

Most of these selection guidelines don't work when ...