Groups

You can group together any selection of objects on the page. Groups act much like a single object, in that you can drag them around the page, resize and rotate them as if they were one object. Many of the items in the template designs from Elements, such as text panels and photo objects are grouped items.

For example, you can draw a simple button from scratch by drawing a rectangle with the Rectangle tool, and then placing a text label on top of this with the Text tool. These are separate objects and you can move them around independently in the Selector tool. But if you select both in the Selector Tool (you can lasso drag around to enclose them both, or hold Shift and click on additional objects) and then right click and choose Group or press "Ctrl + G" (or the menu Arrange -> Group) these now become a grouped object (Hint: the status line at the bottom always tells you what is selected). Now when you drag, resize, rotate this object, all component parts of the group are moved and transformed as if they are one object.

By un-grouping ("Ctrl + U") you can access all the parts of your group again to make any changes. An alternative is that you can sometimes edit items directly inside a group, for example when using the Text tool to edit text or the Photo tool to edit a photo, a click will automatically select the item inside a group.

Soft Groups

There is another type of group, called a 'Soft Group', which is a more loosely connected set of objects. See the Object Handling chapter for details.

Synchronized Text

There is another useful feature of Soft Groups. If you have the same text on two or more objects within a Soft Group, the text will be synchronized when you edit it.