ksbolduan@amherst.bitnet (10/10/90)
To the net, Im writing to ask two questions and offer a handy tip for users of FreeHand 2.02. First, the problem. When you join text to a path, you can not easily resize the newly created object. The resize tool will properly scale the line, but the text remains the same size. Also, if the text is either skewed vertically or horizontally, you cannot rotate the text-on-a-path without destroying the integrity of the text. Apparently, the vertical in the vertical skewing is absolute because text-on-a-path rotated 90 retains its vertical skewing (even though thats not what you want anymore). The only way that I have found to overcome this problem is to group the text-on-a-path. Once you do this, you can resize, rotate, or otherwise transform the grouped object in any way that you want to. However, as soon as you ungroup, the text reverts to its original size and orientation, essentially rendering the text unreadable and useless. So, if you have a text-on-a-path group that youve rotated or scaled, you can never ungroup it to make any changes. Is this just a bug in FreeHand, or is there something that I can do to fix it? Also, there's a very nice feature in Pagemaker that allows you to pick up a line (or anything else) that is lying directly beneath (or on top of) a ruler guide. You simply need to press the Command key while clicking, and you will get your object,not the guide. Is there anything at similar to this in FreeHand? Going to the View menu constantly to Lock and Unlock the guides gets to be a real pain. If there were a key command, I suppose that would do, but a modifier key for a mouse click would make the most sense. Now for the hint. After pulling ruler guides out of either ruler, most of us think that they have to go back into the same ruler where they came from when you want to get rid of them. Not so. You can simply click on the ruler guide, make sure that you get the double arrow indicating that you got it, drag the pointer into either ruler or either scroll bar, and let go of the mouse. While not revolutionary, it does decrease on mouse movement when you want to get some of those ruler guides off of the screen. Kevin Bolduan KSBOLDUAN@AMHERST