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Right-click a spline and you get the commands that edit it. This is the main way to work on a spline once it is drawn.
Important
Under construction. Splines are new and this page describes work in progress. Nothing here is a promise about the finished feature.
Right-clicking an anchor and right-clicking the curve between two anchors give different lists.
- The anchor menu is the long one. Everything that acts on a single anchor is there.
- The curve menu is short: Insert Anchor, plus the commands that act on the whole spline.
Those whole-spline commands sit on both menus on purpose. Aiming at a stroke is easier than aiming at a five pixel anchor.
Where two splines overlap, the topmost one answers the right-click. An anchor or a handle beats a span, even one belonging to another spline, since five pixels is what the hand was aiming at and a span is a whole curve's worth of target.
The menu opens on a spline that is selected or open for editing. Right-click a spline that is neither and nothing opens, because its anchors are not drawn either, and a menu for controls you cannot see would be a menu you cannot use.
Two other cases open a menu of their own, each a single row:
- A locked spline offers Unlock Path and nothing else.
- An imported or baked path offers Convert to Spline and nothing else.
There are no greyed-out rows to work around. If Make Smooth is missing, that anchor is already smooth. If Slide to Inflection is missing, there is no inflection on that span to slide to.
There is exactly one exception, under Unlock Path below.
The anchor you right-clicked, unless that anchor is part of a larger selection, in which case the whole selection.
The label tells you which. It reads Delete Anchor for one and Delete 3 Anchors for three, Lock Path for one spline and Lock 2 Paths for two. You never have to guess how far a command will reach.
Make Corner and Make Smooth change the kind of anchor. Only the one that would change something is offered. See Splines for what the two kinds mean.
Slide to Extreme moves the anchor along its own curve to where the outline reaches furthest. Slide to Inflection moves it to where the curve changes which way it bends. Neither changes the shape of the spline; they move the anchor along the line it already follows. Each appears only when there is one to reach.
Delete Anchor takes the anchor out and lets the span close over the gap.
Dissolve Anchor takes it out and refits its neighbors to hold the curve where it was. Insert an anchor and then dissolve it and you get exactly what you started with. Anywhere else it is a fit rather than an exact undo, and if the spline moves by more than half a percent of the chord the status bar says so and suggests Undo.
Cut Spline cuts at the anchor you clicked. See Cut Spline for the full behavior and for how the palette form differs.
Make Anchor First moves where a closed outline begins. Nothing moves on the canvas; what changes is which anchor the start arrowhead sits on, and what an export writes first. Closed splines only, since an open one's start is already decided by its two ends.
Close Path joins the spline's own two ends, sealing it into an outline.
Connect Anchors and Merge Anchors both join two loose ends, and the difference between them is a segment. Connect bridges the gap by adding a span between the two ends. Merge welds them into a single anchor.
Both read the selection rather than the anchor under the cursor, which no other row here does: select a loose end on each of two splines, then right-click either one. The spline you right-clicked is the one that survives, keeping its name and its style, and the other is absorbed and leaves the Layers panel.
With no gap to bridge, Connect is not offered and Merge is the row that answers. Two ends sitting in the same place are exactly what cutting a closed outline leaves behind, and a span between them would be zero length: the drawing would look right while carrying a doubled anchor for every later command to trip over.
A weld lands at the midpoint of the two ends, taking its incoming handle from the end that arrives and its outgoing handle from the end that leaves. Each handle travels with its own anchor, so the curvature comes with it. A pair already in one place therefore does not move at all, and a separated pair meets where dragging one onto the other would have put it.
Merge also works on the two ends of one spline, which closes it, one anchor shorter than it was. Three anchors is the floor: a run that short would double back on itself rather than enclose anything, so it is refused.
One refusal you cannot see coming. Two ends driven by different construction points cannot be welded, because the one anchor it would make can only carry one of the two bindings. The status bar says so rather than dropping one.
Three rows look alike once they have run, and they are not the same thing. Close Path joins a spline to itself and seals an outline, welding the two ends when they are already in one place. Connect Anchors joins two splines with a new span. Merge Anchors joins two ends into one anchor, on a single spline or across two.
Reverse Direction flips which way the spline runs. It acts on whole paths, the same as the command of that name elsewhere. See Reverse Direction.
Lock Path locks the spline you clicked, or every spline the selection touches.
Focus on Selected Path restricts editing to that spline, or to the selection; the label counts them, so it reads Focus on 2 Paths for two. Clear Focus on Paths ends it. Only one of the two is ever in the menu.
A locked spline shows no anchors at all, so neither of the two menus above can open on it. That is why Unlock is a menu of its own: right-click a locked spline anywhere along it and the only row is Unlock Path.
A spline can be locked three ways, and Unlock clears only the first:
- by its own padlock, which Unlock clears
- by sitting inside a locked group, which you unlock in the Layers panel
- because a node in the node graph reads it
For the second and third the row is shown greyed, and it says where the lock actually lives. This is the one place in these menus where a row appears that cannot act, and the reason is that the menu would otherwise be empty.
Locking a spline you were editing closes it for editing, drops any anchors you had selected, and takes that spline out of the focused set if it was in one.
While focus is on, the splines outside it are not merely quieter. They show no anchors and cannot be edited, clicked into, or inserted into with the Pen. They are still on screen; they are simply out of reach until you clear focus.
- With nothing selected, right-clicking a spline focuses that one.
- With a selection, it focuses the selection.
- Neither row appears when focusing would cover every editable spline, since that is focusing nothing.
- The menu pair is the only way in and the only way out. There is no double-click shortcut and no Done button.
- Turning focus on drops any anchors you had selected on a spline outside the new set, so the keyboard cannot go on editing what the canvas has stopped drawing.
The set is not fixed once you turn it on.
- A spline you start with the Pen while focus is on joins the set. Otherwise it would be born out of reach, with no anchors drawn and nothing to click.
- A spline made by Convert to Spline joins it too, for the same reason: the command exists to hand you something to edit.
- A spline that is deleted leaves, and so does one that stops being editable. Locking it does that, whether from the path menu, from the Layers panel, or by locking a group it sits in.
- That last rule is what keeps you from getting stuck. A focused set holding nothing but locked splines would leave focus on, with nothing editable and no path menu to reach Clear Focus from.
- The focus set goes with the document. Opening another drawing or starting a new one clears it, so focus is never on in a drawing you did not turn it on in.
An import arrives as a path, and a path has no anchors, so none of the above applies to it. Right-click it and the one row offered is Convert to Spline, which makes an editable copy, keeps the original hidden, then selects the copy and opens it for editing.
A locked import offers Unlock instead. Importing never makes something editable on its own, and no click quietly changes that.
Other kinds convert too, a circle, an ellipse, a segment, an arc, a region and a boolean, but only from the command palette. They have no right-click menu of their own.
- Splines: anchors, handles, and what the marks on a spline mean.
- The Pen: drawing a spline, and inserting anchors with the cursor.
- Cut Spline: the palette form, and what cutting does to open and closed splines.
- Close Spline: the palette form of Close Path.
- Convert to Spline: the palette form, which takes a whole selection.
- The Layers panel: where a group's lock lives.
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