Working With Primitives (Predefined Shapes)

To facilitate faster construction, Deneba Canvas™, Adobe® Illustrator®, CorelDRAW and Macromedia® FreeHand® include a set of predefined object shapes or "primitives":

1. Rectangle (including square) 2. Ellipse (including circle) 3. Polygon (including star) 4. Spiral

The user can control the number of sides to polygons and stars.

All the predefined shapes can be converted to editable paths with access to the anchor points. Each program handles this slightly differently, though:

In CorelDRAW the object must first be converted to curves.

In Macromedia FreeHand squares, rectangles, circles, ellipses and spirals must first be ungrouped while polygons and stars are editable by default.

In Adobe Illustrator, all objects are editable by default:

In Deneba Canvas, objects are editable by default except for polygons, stars and spirals which must be converted to paths.

Program	Commands
CorelDRAW	Arrange > Convert To Curves
Adobe Illustrator	(Objects are editable by default)
Macromedia FreeHand	Modify > Ungroup except for polygons and stars
Deneba Canvas	Object > Path > Convert To Paths for polygons, stars and spirals only