Subtitles of the Movie

Continuing my review of ways to edit your vector paths, the Path Panel provides quick access to a number of path related commands. You can use the tools on this panel to speed up all the path editing tasks that I've covered thus far. Notice that you have Path combine tools, Path alter tools, and then Point edit and select tools. Like I demonstrated before, the Path Combine techniques require two paths to be overlapping, so let's go ahead and join the paths, split the paths. Next is Union paths, and we have Intersect paths. Oh, I need to split those up in order for, so there are my two paths, they're split, and let's go ahead and choose Intersect Paths. Undo that. And choose the next one, Divide Paths, a little bit different. That's an interesting technique. Let's select both paths now and choose the last option, Crop Paths. Again, the best way to learn these is to get some paths on your canvas and experiment. Let's split those paths up and now let's color them differently so we can see better what Fireworks is doing. You can also alter paths here. Here you can smooth the path by a set amount, one through 25, and also the next one there is Expand the Stroke. Let's expand the stroke by a set amount here, width, miter limit, edit caps, and the corner bevel. That's kind of interesting. Let's try that on this one. Next you have the Insert Expand Paths, Inset Paths, Directions, Outside or Inside the Width, the Corners, Bevel, Round Miter, the Miter limit. Kind of interesting there. Let's undo that and see the difference, insert paths there. A little bit different when I applied that technique to this shape. Next you have the Open Closed path, let's go ahead and create a closed path. Let's delete some of these vector objects from my canvas. And let's take the Pen tool and create an open path there. And now let's close it. Notice that this either opens a closed path or closes an open path and vice versa. Next is the Extrude paths command, with the settings for Distance, Angle, Taper and Twist. That's a very interesting effect here. There is the Extrude Path for that path. Let's do an Extrude for this one. Oop. Let's select that with the Selection tool, and notice that I have settings there for how I want that extrusion to take place. Next is the Blend paths option. This operation requires two or more paths, so let's select all the paths on there, and choose the Blend paths. Set the steps for five. Flatten blended portions, Original paths will not be flattened. You cannot clone the object so an error has occurred. Let's try two different more simple paths here. Let's try that path and let's create another simple shape here. Select both of them and let's try the Extrude command again five steps. And there are the results. Then we have some point editing commands below. Use these tools for editing the paths of a selected vector shape. Let's get rid of this one and let's start with something that I'm drawing with the pen tool. Close that off like so. Let's go ahead and fill it with something. The first one is the Straighten Points command. Compare that; let's try a regular octagon there, and notice that the straighten points has no effect because I have no curved line segments, so if we go back here and have a lot of curved lines I can straighten that by clicking on the Straighten path. I also have a Smooth points, which will make things more curvy, so these tend to work in opposite directions. Let's try seeing if this octagon will curve; it will. I can straighten it back. Next to that is the Round Points to Pixels option. Not all of these will have an effect on your shapes.