Layer Palette

The Layer Palette provides a view of your mandala as a stack of layers. When the New Shape Button is pressed, a new Shape appears as the topmost layer in your drawing in the Canvas and at the top of the Layer Palette as a Layer Pane.

The Layer Palette allows you to select any Shape in your drawing, rearrange the layers, or delete a layer.

Be Aware:

In this section we will use the terms layer and shape interchangeably. They both refer to one drawing element (Shape) at a specified position (Layer) in the drawing's stacking order.

When you press the New Shape button a new Shape Pane appears in the Layer Palette, representing your new shape. Each Shape Pane contains a verbal description of the shape it represents and also a small swatch depicting the Line and Fill Paints of the shape. The information in the Shape Pane will be dynamically updated as you make changes to the shape.

The shape description includes the name of the shape and selected attribute information, to make identifying the shape easier. For example, Circles will include a notation of their Radius, i.e. - (R=153).

The Line/Fill Swatch is filled with the shape's fill Paint and stroked around its edges with the Line Paint and at the shape's set line width.

If you click on a Shape Pane in the Layer Palette the shape that is represented by that Shape Pane will become the selected shape. The Shape Pane will be highlighted in blue and selection handles will appear on the selected shape in the Canvas.

Once a shape is selected, any adjustments made in the Shape Palette, Ringshape Palette, Line & Fill Palette, or Transform Palette will alter the selected shape. The selected shape can also be adjusted by dragging its selection handles as described in Working with Shapes

Note that only one shape may be selected at a time, so selecting a shape will deselect any previously selected shape.

In the case of Compound Shapes — the Planet and Ring of Shapes — there are two modes of selection:

As described in the Canvas section, different selection handles appear when the component shape is selected, which allow the ringshape's attributes to be adjusted by dragging them.

The order of the Shape Panes within the Layer Palette represents the stacking order of your shapes, with the top layer at the top of the palette and so on down to the lowest layer at the bottom of the palette. You can change the stacking order by dragging a Shape Pane up or down within the Layer Palette.

When you drag a Shape Pane, a blue highlight will indicate where the Pane will end up when you drop it. If another Pane is highlighted, the dropped Pane will take its place in the stacking order and the other Panes will be moved accordingly. If a blue highlight appears between Panes, the dropped Pane will go between the adjacent Panes.

The Layer Palette has a Pop-up Menu which can be accessed by clicking on its trigger, the arrow icon in the upper right of the palette. The menu contains a couple of useful commands: