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Visual Editing

The Properties editor allows access to every attribute of a source, and is useful for setting precise values. However, generally, changing values blindly is not ideal and this is where visual editing comes in. visual paletteWhen a source is selected the left hand side of the screen is occupied by the visual palette, shown here. There are buttons for most of the most obviously "visual" of the attributes of a source.

The next three are applicable only to radial sources and do not appear when another type of source is selected.

The “Function” features are not available in SourcesLite.

 

Visual editing works as follows:

When you click on one of the visual palette buttons the button becomes highlighted. A green dot appears indicating the current value of the attribute. You vary the value of the attribute by dragging with your finger left and right. As you do so, the green marker moves left and right, and the parameter changes in the source with instant feedback on the screen. A red marker is left at the position representing the starting value. You can click on as many buttons, as many times as you want. When you are happy with the effect you click on OK and all of the changes are accepted as a batch. (The entire set of changes can be rolled back as a single operation using the undo button.) You can also hit the cancel button at any time, and this will undo all of the changes you have made - you can thus use this visual editing facility for exploring effects. As long as you don't have too many sources in your picture then the visual response should normally be very quick. As a general rule of thumb, even quite complex pictures can be created using 2 or 3 sources, anything above 7 or 8 is unusual.

Three kinds of attribute work a little differently.

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