Lacoura Vector
Drawing & editing
How the pen, the pencil, the shape tools and the scissors behave, and what the layers and inspector panels are for.
Artboards
An artboard is the page. Shift + O then drag creates one; with the tool active you can select, move and resize existing artboards, and the size is shown as you drag. Everything outside an artboard still exists — it is just not on the page.
The pen
- Click places a corner point.
- Click and drag places a smooth point and pulls out its handles as you drag.
- Close the path by clicking the first point again.
- Esc ends an open path.
The pencil
Draw freehand. Nothing is committed while the pointer is down — on release the raw input is simplified and fitted to smooth curves, and the whole stroke becomes a single undo step. That means a long stroke undoes as one action rather than a hundred.
Editing points
A (Direct Selection) is where path editing happens. Click an anchor to select it, drag to move it, and drag its handles to change the curve either side. Rectangles and ellipses are live shapes rather than paths; the first operation that genuinely needs points — cutting one with the scissors, for instance — converts the shape to a path automatically.
Scissors
C, then click anywhere on a path. The cut is exact: the curve is split mathematically at the point you clicked, so the two halves together have precisely the shape the original did. A new anchor appears where you cut.
Type
T, then click and type. The text box is a real editable field laid over the canvas, so selection, cursor keys and system text input all behave as they should. Remember that the default fill is white — on a white artboard set a fill colour first or the text will look like it did not appear.
Fill and stroke
The two overlapping swatches at the foot of the tool rail are fill (front) and stroke (back). Click either to open the colour picker; the small controls beneath swap them and reset them to the defaults.
Layers and the inspector
- Layers (right) — stacking order, visibility and locking. The topmost row paints last.
- Blend and opacity sit under the layer list and apply to the current layer.
- Inspector — the selected object’s own properties.
- Pathfinder (top bar) — unite, subtract, intersect and exclude on a selection, plus a numeric offset.
Undo
Cmd/Ctrl + Z and Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Z. Gestures that preview while you drag — moving, resizing, drawing — commit a single history entry when you release, not one per frame.