Manipulating parts

The main view of a parts document does not have a tool palette. Selection and object manipulation in this view can be done in the same ways as the Selection tool in the part editor does, allowing you to move, scale, rotate, and skew selected elements.

The purpose of the main view in the parts document is organizing and categorizing parts and creating preassembled poses (in character files) and scenes (in background files).

Organizing parts

When you are creating your own parts files you can organize them any way you like. Comic Strip Factory has several conventions generally followed for the parts files bundled with it, however. For this work of organizing the file, the Parts View popup in the toolbar should be set to All with Poses (for character documents) or All with Scenes (for background documents). We recommend that the width of the layout be limited so that the entire document is able to be viewed with only vertical scrolling, for a reasonable window size at a 100% view scale. Requiring two-dimensional scrolling makes it harder to fine things.

In a character document, assembled poses are generally arranged at the top, with individual parts of the various types under them, arranged together in a top-to-bottom order approximating their order on the body. The parts in the assembled poses should be grouped together with the Group command in the Objects menu. This makes it easier for users to select a pose and drag it in to a comic all at once. Within clumps of like parts, they should be arranged with overall aesthetics in mind as well as compactness. Similarly facing heads should be together. Hands in similar positions seen from different directions should be placed in pairs.

In a background document, assembled scenes should also be at the top. Often there is only one scene, but there may be two or more related scenes in a file. The parts in a scene should be grouped as poses are. Additional props associated with scenes should be arranged under the scenes.

Categorizing parts

To make it easier to find parts when building a comic, every part should be categorized with a part type. This can be done in the parts view (the main view of the parts document) by selecting each object and either choosing a part type from the Part Type submenu in the Objects menu or right-clicking on the part to open a contextual menu and using the Part Type submenu.

To make it easy to find which parts are either miscategorized or not categorized at all (that is, their part type is Unspecified), you can set the parts view to be either sorted, by choosing All by Type from the Parts View popup menu in the toolbar, or filtered, by choosing a particular part type from that popup menu. Even parts that are grouped in the All with Poses or All with Scenes view are shown separately in these views. Many kinds of editing are restricted in these views—for example you cannot move or delete parts—but you can change the part types, and doing so will re-sort or re-filter the view so you can see what categorization work still needs to be done.

Fixing part types in the All by Type view.

These views can also help identify whole poses that have been grouped together into a single part. To break up poses like this, you can open them with Edit , then select sets of paths within them that should be separate parts, and choose Split to Separate Part… from the Objects menu.