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<chapter id="firststeps"> 
<title>First Steps</title> 
<para> Lets create something
so that we can tweak with it. Now that you have a new composition open
and the properties dialog is out of the way, go over to the toolbox and
click on the circle tool(If you don't know which one it is, just mouse
over them until you find the one with the tooltip that says "circle").</para>

<para>The second you click on the circle tool, you should notice that the tool
options tab changed. But we'll get to that later.

    <footnote><para>Some laptop users might experience trouble where click-drag on
    the canvas when using the circle tool doesn't seem to do anything
    or produce insanely huge circles. The problem is that Synfig has
    detected the touchpad and enabled that device (incorrectly!) To fix
    this: click File->Input devices... In the resulting dialog window,
    select 'Disabled' for your touchpad device. After this change,
    your external mouse and the touchpad will work as expected.</para></footnote>
</para>
    <para>With the circle tool selected, you can now create circles in the
    canvas window. This pretty much works exactly as you might expect
    it to. Go ahead and create two (or more, if you fancy) circles. If
    by accident you just clicked on the canvas instead of clicking and
    dragging(with mouse button pressed) to draw the circle, you end up
    creating a circle with 0 radius and it is effectively invisible! No
    need to worry, you can easily fix this. In the Params dialog, you
    can change the parameters of the selected object. If you just made
    a 0 radius circle, it should be the current selected object. you can
    change its radius to some value other than 0, say 10, and manipulate
    it to your liking with the canvas ducks later.</para>

    <para>Now go back to the toolbox and click on the normal tool (the blue
    circle with the arrow on it). After you do this, click on one of your
    circles. You will then see a bounding box(which is kinda useless
    at this point in time, but I digress), a green dot at the center,
    and a cyan dot on the radius. Those dots are called ducks. If you
    want to modify the circle, grab a duck and drag it around. Easy!</para>

    <para>So you can select a layer by clicking on it. If you want to select
    more than one layer, hold down CONTROL while you are clicking--this
    works in both the canvas window and the layer tab. Try it!</para>

    <para>You can also select multiple ducks. You can do this in several
    ways. First, you can hold down CONTROL and individually click the
    ducks that you want selected, but this can be tedious. However, there
    is a much faster method--just create a selection box by clicking the
    mouse and dragging it over the area of ducks that you want selected.<para>

    <para>Go ahead and select two circles, and select all of their ducks. With
    several ducks selected, moving one duck will move all of the
    ducks. This behavior is dependent on the normal tool. Thus, a
    more descriptive name for this tool might have been the "move" or
    "translate" tool.</para>

    <para>The Rotate and Scale tools work much like the Normal tool, except in
    the case where you have multiple ducks selected. It is much easier
    to just try it than read about it. Select a few circles, select all
    of their ducks, and try using the rotate and scale tools.</para>

    <para>Note that, unlike the normal tool, the other duck manipulation tools
    DO have options associated with them. If a particular tool isn't
    doing what you want, take a look in the tool options tab to see if
    it is set up like you want it.</para>
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</chapter>