7.0

Groups
You can group together any selection of objects on the page. Groups act much like a single object, in
that you can drag them around the page, resize and rotate them as if they were one object. Many of the
items in the template designs from the Designs Gallery
such as buttons, text panels, and photo objects are grouped items.
For example, you can draw a simple button from scratch by drawing a rectangle with the Rectangle
Tool, and then placing a text label on top of this with the Text Tool. These are separate objects and you
can move them around independently in the Selector Tool. But if you select both in the Selector Tool
(you can lasso drag around to enclose them both, or hold "Shift" and click on additional objects) and
right click and choose Group (or press "Ctrl + G" or use the menu "Arrange" > "Group"), these now
become a grouped object (Hint
: The status line at the bottom always tells you what is selected). Now when you drag, resize, rotate this
object, all component parts of the group are moved and transformed as if they are one object.
Important:
Grouped objects are usually converted into a single graphic object when you export your web page.
By un-grouping (right click and choose Ungroup or press "Ctrl + U"), you can access all the parts of
your group again to make any changes. An alternative is that you can sometimes edit items directly inside
a group. For example when using the Text Tool
to edit text or the Photo tool to edit a photo, a click will automatically select the item inside a group.
Converting Text To Be A Graphic
As mentioned above only a very limited number of fonts are available in web browsers. If you want to
use a different font on a button or, say, as a heading, you can do this by ensuring it is converted to a
graphic, and all you need to do is group the object to make this happen automatically. You can still edit
the text inside the group, but groups are automatically converted into a graphic when the website is
exported.
So all you need to do to include a font like this is to group it. It doesn't have to be grouped with anything
- you can group it with itself, by just selecting Group from the Arrange
menu or pressing "Ctrl + G".
Soft Groups
There is another type of group, called a 'Soft Group', which is a more loosely connected set of objects.
The difference between Groups and Soft Groups is:

When you group items they must all be on a single layer (if they are not they are moved to a
single layer when you group the items). Soft groups retain their layers, so you can tie together
items across multiple layers.

Groups are usually converted into a single graphic when exported as HTML for a website. Soft
Groups are not and each object is exported as a separate item. Text inside a soft group is kept
as text in the HTML, whereas text in Groups is converted into a graphic (with some exceptions).

You can nest groups inside other groups. For complex drawings consisting of many, sometimes
thousands of shapes, creating a hierarchy of nested groups is a good organizational technique,
just like having folder inside other folders. Soft Groups however cannot be nested and are
designed primarily a way of tying multiple objects on different layers together.
Because Soft Groups can contain items on different layers, when you select a Soft Grouped item on one
layer it will automatically select the corresponding 'soft grouped' item/s on other layers, often a layer that
is not even visible. See the section on Layers below to understand more about this.
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