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transform rotate
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Rotate (tool)Turn the selected free points around a center.
Menu: Transform > Rotate | Node: Rotate | In depth: Transform tools
Pick a center, then turn the selection around it. A positive angle turns clockwise, and you can either drag to the angle you want or type it.
This is the thing to understand about all the transform tools, and it is a feature rather than a limit.
Rotate moves hand-placed free points. Everything else in your drawing is computed from those points, so it comes along on its own: rotate the three points a circle and its tangent were built from and the whole figure turns, still a circle, still tangent.
If you select a finished shape and rotate, you may find nothing happens. The shape has no free points in it, only derived ones. Run Select Roots first, which works back from what you have selected to the free points underneath it, then rotate those.
A figure built properly rotates from a handful of points. A figure that has been detached from its construction has to be rotated point by point, which is one of the reasons to leave a construction live.
The center, which stays still. A reference point, saying where you are turning from. The handle, saying where that reference should end up. The angle between the two, measured at the center, is the rotation.
Every click can land on a point, on a crossing of two objects, or on a spot along a segment, circle or arc, so you can rotate by an angle the drawing already contains rather than one you measured. Clicking truly empty space is allowed too, and that just drops the handle where you clicked.
A missed click never cancels the gesture. Escape does that.
Typing an angle instead is often quicker, and it is the only way to be exact about something the drawing does not already contain: a twelve-fold pattern wants 30 degrees, not 29.8.
For a one-off adjustment, this tool. For a rotation that is part of the pattern, use the Rotate node instead: it keeps the angle as a number you can drive with a slider, and it can repeat the rotation to build a rosette, which no amount of clicking will do for you.
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- In the node graph: Rotate - apply the same rotation as a node.