view show bounding box

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Modeling Menus

Show Bounding Box (command)

Transform handles around a selection of anchors.

Menu: View > Show Bounding Box | In depth: Splines, Transform tools

A checkable toggle, on by default.

Select two or more anchors on a spline and eight small hollow rings appear around them, one at each corner of their bounding box and one at the middle of each side. They are handles, not geometry: nothing is drawn between them, and they never export.

Scaling

Drag a ring and every selected anchor moves together, as one scaling, about the ring opposite the one in your hand. That opposite ring stays exactly where it is, which is what the gesture is for: drag the top-right ring of a rectangle and its bottom-left corner holds still while the two corners between them travel just enough to keep the edges square. Moving one anchor by itself could not do that.

A corner ring scales both directions at once. A side ring scales one, so the opposite side holds its position.

• Shift keeps the proportions.
• Option (Alt on Windows) scales about the center of the box instead, so it grows both ways.

Rotating

Move just outside the rings and the pointer picks up a small curved arrow. Drag from there and the selection turns, again about the opposite ring, which lights up so you can see what it is turning around.

• Shift turns in steps of 90 degrees.
• Option turns about the center of the box.

Two handles instead of eight

Select anchors that all sit on one horizontal or one vertical line and you get two rings rather than eight, on the live direction only, and no box around them.

This is not a special case so much as arithmetic: the selection has no height to scale, and no drag can give it one, since scaling multiplies and anything multiplied by nothing is nothing. The six rings that would try are not offered. A single anchor gets no handles at all.

When no handles appear

• Nothing is selected, or only one anchor is.
• Whole objects are selected rather than anchors within a spline. Use the Transformations panel, which can scale and rotate about any of nine named points.
• The anchors are driven by construction points. A spline built on points follows those points, so it declines to be transformed directly, and no handles are offered for a drag that would be declined. Move or unbind the driving points instead.

Turning this toggle off hides the handles and the rotate band with them. The Rotate and Scale tools and the Transformations panel are unaffected.

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