Tools Overview

Tools are how you work on the canvas by hand — selecting, drawing, measuring, editing, transforming. Most of them live in the Toolbar, and a lot have menu commands and keyboard shortcuts too.

Whichever tool is active decides what a click or drag does. So if the canvas isn't doing what you expect, check which tool you're on first.

The toolset

• Editor — select objects, contours, and nodes, then move or refine them.
• Pencil — draw custom strokes, mostly for Handmade fills.
• Knife — add points, split curves, and cut along a line.
• Meter — measure distances and angles.
• Transform — move, scale, rotate, and skew a selection.
• Brush, Rectangle, Ellipse, and Freeform — create and edit masks.

Start with the Editor

The Editor is the one you'll use the most. It selects fills, masks, curves, nodes, layers — pretty much anything in the document. Once something's selected, you refine it with the on-canvas controls or the Properties panel.

Tools for masks

Four tools handle masks. The Brush paints them by hand, Rectangle and Ellipse give you clean geometric shapes, and Freeform draws custom outlines and can pick out shapes from the source image.

These are what you use when a fill should only show up in part of the artwork.