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Rectangle / square tool
For drawing a rectangle, click and drag with the left mouse button. The rectangle will immediately appear in your drawing. To draw a perfect square, hold down the Ctrl key while click-dragging with the mouse.
[F4 or R]
The square-shaped handles can be used to change the rectangle's size. However, the mouse is very imprecise when you only want to change either the height or the width of the rectangle. Here again, use the Ctrl key to restrict the size change to either width or height of the rectangle.
The circular handles are for rounding the corners. Grab a circular handle and move it just a tiny bit. Now all four corners will be rounded. Additionally, a second circular handle has appeared. Each handle changes the amount of rounding in one direction.
To recover the initial, sharp-cornered shape, click on the right-most icon in the tool controls bar. This is very useful, when you're still learning how to master the usage of the circular handles!
It is not possible to only change a single corner of the rectangle independant from the others. The circular handles work on all 4 corners simultaneously. To achieve this effect of only having a single rounded corner, you could, for example, stack several geometrical shapes.
When you need to draw a rectangle with accurate dimensions, you can use the tool controls bar:
- the field labelled W is for the width;
- the field labelled H is for the height;
- Rx and Ry define the rounding radius for the corners.
The dropdown menu allows you to select the unit you need for your rectangle.
When you hold down Ctrl while dragging the square-shaped handles, it is easy to limit the change in the rectangle's size to a single direction.
Moving the circular handle allows to round the corners. When the corners are rounded, two circular handles allow you to change the corners' radii independently for both directions.
Rx and Ry determine the radius of the imaginary circle that the rounding is based upon.
The options of the Rectangle tool are useful when you would like to set a specific size for your rectangle or square.