Select & transform — Moving, scaling and flipping objects

How do I select an object?

Switch to Select on the tool rail, then tap an object on the canvas — its inspector opens automatically (a run/satin/fill/blend inspector depending on its kind) and handles appear around it.

How do I select more than one object?

Drag out a marquee across the canvas. Selection is shape-aware rather than purely bounding-box based, so a marquee that just grazes a ring’s bounding box (like the empty middle of a letter “O”) won’t accidentally pull it in.

What can I do with the on-canvas handles?

Drag inside the shape — move it
Drag a corner handle — scale uniformly
Drag an edge handle — stretch along a single axis only (available on Fill, Run and Satin objects)
Rotate handle — rotate freely, with snap points every 15°
Flip — horizontal or vertical mirroring of the selection, also from the handles

None of these are sliders in a panel — they’re all direct manipulation on the canvas itself, which is why there’s no separate “Transform” menu to look for.

Do my stitch settings change when I scale something?

No — the geometry scales and the plan is re-generated, so density, stitch length and pull compensation stay the physical millimetres you set and the stitch count adapts by itself.

A satin band keeps its width too, as long as that width is a setting rather than the drawing: scale a 3 mm star up by half and it is still a 3 mm band around a bigger star. The exception is a band whose width is the artwork — a pressure-drawn stroke, per-node widths from the Points tool, and lettering — where the width scales with the shape. See Satin.

One thing to watch: scaling a 3D Puff section can push its columns out of the foam band it was set up for. The app says so in a message and tells you which width it now wants.

How do I get something straight again?

The rotation handle measures the dominant edge direction of what you’ve selected — for a rectangle all four edges agree on the answer — and its snap points sit where that direction lands on a multiple of 15°, plumb included. So a rectangle you drew 3° crooked clicks straight at −3°, not at some multiple of the angle you happened to start dragging from.

While you drag, a badge on the handle reads the selection’s deviation from plumb, not the angle you’ve turned so far: drag until it says 0, and at the level stop it says Level outright. That one stop grabs harder than its neighbours (±4° against ±2.5°) because it’s the one people are hunting for. Drag on and you override any of them — the snap forgives near-misses, it doesn’t insist.

Three more ways, all in Align:

Straighten — one tap, with the measured skew on the label (“Straighten (−3.2°)”). It’s also on a double-tap of the rotation handle, which additionally opens a keypad for typing an exact angle.
Straighten to “Name” — appears when a multi-selection contains pieces that are crooked by different amounts. It levels the whole selection rigidly by the named piece’s skew, so a motif punched into a rectangle turns with its rectangle and keeps its registration. You name the plumb that matters; StitchPencil doesn’t average.
Straighten each — the opposite choice for the same situation: every piece onto its own plumb, each about its own center, so nothing moves out of place. A group counts as one piece — a word is never taken apart.

When the selection has no shared direction, the handle stops promising one: no absolute snap points, no Level badge. A circle has no edge direction at all and doesn’t get a vote either way.

Can I type an exact angle?

Double-tap the rotation handle. A small pad opens right at the grip: a keypad for the degrees to turn by (with a sign, so −7.5 turns the other way), and above it a Straighten button carrying the measured skew when the selection has a direction to measure. It is the same keypad the sliders use, so a number you type is a number you get.

Does the grid do anything, or is it just drawn?

With the grid on (Settings → project), a moved selection catches the grid lines. The reference is the selection box’s lower-left corner, one per axis, and the catch reaches a quarter of the grid spacing — at most half a millimetre. So a fine grid catches finely and leaves room to move freely between the lines, and every catch puts the edge on a line rather than somewhere between two. Keep dragging and you slide past it. Turning the grid off makes it purely visual again.

How do I move something by an exact amount?

Nudge — in the Selection Action Bar and in the object’s action grid. It opens a small arrow pad that stays put while you work: four directions, the step size in the middle, and the distance you’ve moved so far on the line underneath.

Tap the middle to change the step: 0.1 / 1 / 5 mm (0.01 / 0.05 / 0.25 in on an inch project). 0.1 mm is deliberately the finest rung — that’s the grid machine files are written on, so it’s the smallest move that survives the export.
Hold an arrow to repeat, rather than tapping thirty times.
The whole session is one undo step. Nudge a dozen times, press undo once, and the object is back where it started. Pause for a moment and the next nudge begins a fresh step, so you can also unwind in stages.

The pad works on whatever a drag would move: a single object, a drilled-down group member, a whole group, a multi-selection, or a reference image.

How do I center an object?

Align, in the same two places. The first three entries center the selection in the hoop — both axes, or one at a time.

Below them, if the selection is sitting on top of something, there’s an entry for each object underneath, named: “Center on “Fill 1””. StitchPencil doesn’t pick one for you — a guess about position is one you’d have to check every time, so the menu says which object it means and you choose. When nothing lies underneath, that part of the menu simply isn’t there.

Centering means the object’s bounding box — the same box whose handles you see on the canvas, so what you grab is what gets centered. On a strongly asymmetric shape (a crescent, a comma) that isn’t the same as its visual balance point; it is, however, what every drawing tool means by “center”, and the one you can predict.

What if the object I’m centering is bigger than the one underneath?

It still centers — and StitchPencil says so afterwards, because the object you aligned to has just disappeared under the one you moved. A brief message names it; undo is right there if that wasn’t what you wanted. Objects of the same size don’t trigger it (blend layers are copies of one another, so “larger” would be untrue of them).

What is the small green circle on my selected object?

That’s the entry point — the spot where the machine starts stitching this object, and therefore where its one visible seam ends up. It shows on every selected object, right on the outline.

A hollow ring means StitchPencil picked the spot for you. It aims for the shortest sensible travel from wherever the previous object finished.
A filled circle means you pinned it yourself.

How do I move where an object starts stitching?

Drag the green circle along the outline. It snaps to the nearest point on the shape — including the edge of a hole, if you drag it there — and pins itself where you let go. The whole drag is a single undo step.

This matters most on closed shapes. A hexagon, a ring, a letter O has no natural start, so the seam lands wherever the geometry happens to begin — which is often a corner, exactly where it shows. Drag the entry to the middle of an edge, or to a spot another object will later cover, and the seam disappears into the design.

How do I get the automatic entry point back?

Select the object, open More in the Selection Action Bar, and choose Reset entry point. The option only appears while an entry is actually pinned. After that the circle goes hollow again and StitchPencil picks the spot for you as before.

What’s in the Selection Action Bar?

A small floating bar near your selection, holding what a hand reaches for while drawing: Nodes, Knife, Convert, Align, More, and Nudge beyond the divider. On a single object it is those six whatever you selected — the bar does not change length under your hand.

Everything you decide once per motif sits behind More, in sections: Cut holes and Zones, then Blend, Sashiko and Contour, then Overlaps, then Copy/Paste style, Reset entry point and Delete. Groups and multiple selections have their own bars, with Join, Merge and Border among them.

Nothing is bar-only: the object inspector shows every one of these as a tile in its action grid, which is the better place to browse when you are looking for something rather than reaching for it. See Cut, combine & convert for what each one does.