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Removing Soft Groups
To disband a Soft Group, select it and choose “ARRANGE" > "REMOVE SOFT GROUP” (or
press “Ctrl + Alt +U”). The objects don’t get deleted, they are just no longer linked
together by a Soft Group.
Text Synchronization
Any text objects which have the same text value and which are members of the same
Soft Group are kept synchronized if any of those text objects are edited. So change
the text in one object and any other text objects that had the exact same characters
will also be changed to match. Only the text value itself if synchronized, so different
text objects can have different sizes, fonts and text attributes.
Text synchronization using Soft Groups is useful where a label is duplicated in several
places, perhaps in different styles and you want each object to show the same label.
Also sometimes "shadow-like" effects can be achieved by placing two or more copies
of text very close to each other, but slightly offset.
To stay synchronized, the text objects must:
• Be all in the same soft group.
• And have exactly the same text on them at the time when the soft group is
created.
• And either have overlapping bounding boxes, or be on different layers.
Alignment
This lets you accurately align or distribute two or more objects.
Quick aligning
Select the objects you want to align, and right click the selection to choose ALIGN from
the drop-down menu, and then do one of the following:
• Align the objects vertically by choosing
LEFT EDGES, CENTERS or RIGHT EDGES.
• Align the objects horizontally by choosing
TOP EDGES, CENTERS or BOTTOM EDGES.
Aligning and distributing space
If you want to distribute space between the objects as well as align them, select the
objects, right click the selection and choose "
ALIGN" > "ALIGNMENT" to display the
Object Alignment dialog. Alternatively choose "
ARRANGE" > "ALIGNMENT" ("Ctrl + +
L").