Good day everyone. Welcome to Learn with MN. In this video, we will discuss the first tool of Inkscape that is the Selection Tool.
The first tool in the toolbar, with an arrow symbol, is Selection Tool. You can also select it via the shortcut key S. As from the name the Selection Tool is used to make selections.
Moreover, you can move, scale, rotate, and skew with the selection tool. Let's start by making selections. I have made some objects to understand different ways of selection.
To select a single object, just click it, and it will be selected. You can select any object here by simply clicking it and it will be selected. But if you select this green square, it is not selecting.
The reason is that this object is locked. To unlock all locked objects, Go to Objects Menu and click Unlock All. This will unlock all locked objects.
If you click it, it is now selecting. For multiple objects selection, there are different ways. For example, we can add or subtract any object to or from the selection using the Shift key.
Hold Shift and click those objects you want to add in selection like these pink, red, and brown squares. If you like to add a blue square, hold Shift and click it, it will be added to the selection. Similarly, say you want to deselect red and brown squares from selection, again hold Shift and click them.
So, in simple words, by using the Shift key, and if an object is selected then it will be deselected, and if an object is deselected then it will be selected on click. Another way to select multiple objects is by clicking and dragging them over. If I click, hold and drag over these objects, you see a dotted box created.
Any object touched by this dotted box will be selected. If I release it here, then these three will be selected. Now, if you see here this button, this plays an important role.
If it is checked, then any object that is touched by the dotted box while dragging will be selected as we did before. But when we uncheck it, it will only select those objects that lie inside the dotted box. Like, if I drag over these four squares then only pink and yellow squares are selected because these two are only fully inside the dotted box.
To select the brown and red squares too, they should lie inside the box like this. One more way to select multiple objects is by using the Alt key. Let's take this example to understand this.
Hold Alt; click, hold and drag over these lines. As you move the cursor, you see a red line is formed. This line indicates the path of the cursor and each object that is touched by this red line will be selected.
Let's say I want to select the first four-line, then hold Alt, click and move 1,2,3, and 4; so four lines are selected. This type of selection is very useful in situations where objects are large in number and are very close to each other. Moving towards the last example.
You can see, there is a square and a circle inside it, but actually, it is not inside or over it. This circle is behind the square. If I select the square; you can see its opacity is reduced to 75%, that's why you can see the circle.
Now, the problem here is how to select the circle without moving the square? If I click on the circle it is selecting square, not the circle, because it is behind the square. So, to select an object under any other object, hold Alt and click it.
With Alt, it will be selected and you can move it out as you like. Now, what for all objects selection. With Ctrl-A, you can select all objects of the current layer.
You can also do this same job from this button here. To select all objects of all layers, Alt-Ctrl-A is used or you can use this button. For deselection, you can use this button right after or you can press the Escape key to deselect the selection.
Or even more easy to click outside the selection to cancel it any time. If you can't remember the shortcuts, then you can perform all these actions by going into the Edit tab. Here all options are available with their shortcut keys.
Let's understand the scaling of objects. When any object is selected, eight double-headed arrows appear in a rectangle, four on corners and four on each side, around the selection. By click and drag of any handle will rescale the selection.
The corner arrows scale the object in both horizontal and vertical directions like this, while the side arrows scale in only one direction. Left and right side arrows scale horizontally. And top and bottom side arrows scale vertically.
There are some other ways to scale objects using Ctrl and Shift. By holding Ctrl, you can preserve the width and height ratio of the object like this. The Shift key scale objects evenly from the center of the selection.
And the combination of Ctrl and Shift together scale an object in preserved ratio and from the center of the selection. When you click again on a selected object, you will see that the direction of all arrows is changed. If you focus on the corner arrows.
These are changed to curved double-headed arrows. These arrows are used for rotation. If I click and drag you will see now object is rotating.
The rotation of the selected object takes place around this plus sign which is called rotation center. You can change its position by simply dragging. To undo the position of rotation center back to the center of selection, Hold the Shift key and click on the rotation handle and it will come back to its default position.
Now, let's move to some combinations and other techniques of rotation. Ctrl is used to rotate the object by snap angle. Snap angle is a fixed value by which an object will be rotated.
If I rotate by holding ctrl, you will see it is rotating by a fixed angle. You can see in the status bar it is 15, then 30, 45, and so on. By default, its value is 15°, so it will change the rotation by 15°.
You can change the snap angle from Preferences. Moving next, Shift is used to rotate the object around the opposite corner. If I choose this corner for rotation then holding Shift will fix its opposite corner and rotate the object around it like this.
Here these buttons are used to rotate the object by 90 degrees. Let's select this object. This is for rotating counterclockwise and this is for clockwise.
For flipping, this is to flip horizontally, and this is for vertically. You can perform all the actions by going to the Object tab. Last is Skew.
For skewing, the remaining four arrows on each side are used like this. With Alt, you can skew it by a snap angle that is 15 degrees by default. While by using Shift, the object is skewed around the opposite side by keeping the other side unchanged.
This technique is very useful for making different types of shapes very easily. That was all for the first tool of the Inkscape. In upcoming videos, we will discuss geometric shapes tools of Inkscape in detail, so stay tuned.
If you have any queries, feel free to write in the comment section or contact us on our website, its link is in the description. If you like this video, please Like, Subscribe, and Hit the bell icon, so you don’t miss any updates. Thank you for watching.
