# First Steps

Lets create something so that we can tweak with it. Now that you have a new composition open and the properties dialog is out of the way, go over to the toolbox and click on the circle tool(If you don't know which one it is, just mouse over them until you find the one with the tooltip that says "circle").

The second you click on the circle tool, you should notice that the tool options tab changed. But we'll get to that later.

Some laptop users might experience trouble where click-drag on the canvas when using the circle tool doesn't seem to do anything or produce insanely huge circles. The problem is that Synfig has detected the touchpad and enabled that device (incorrectly!) To fix this: click File->Input devices... In the resulting dialog window, select 'Disabled' for your touchpad device. After this change, your external mouse and the touchpad will work as expected.

With the circle tool selected, you can now create circles in the canvas window. This pretty much works exactly as you might expect it to. Go ahead and create two (or more, if you fancy) circles. If by accident you just clicked on the canvas instead of clicking and dragging(with mouse button pressed) to draw the circle, you end up creating a circle with 0 radius and it is effectively invisible! No need to worry, you can easily fix this. In the Params dialog, you can change the parameters of the selected object. If you just made a 0 radius circle, it should be the current selected object. you can change its radius to some value other than 0, say 10, and manipulate it to your liking with the canvas ducks later.

Now go back to the toolbox and click on the normal tool (the blue circle with the arrow on it). After you do this, click on one of your circles. You will then see a bounding box(which is kinda useless at this point in time, but I digress), a green dot at the center, and a cyan dot on the radius. Those dots are called ducks. If you want to modify the circle, grab a duck and drag it around. Easy!

So you can select a layer by clicking on it. If you want to select more than one layer, hold down CONTROL while you are clicking--this works in both the canvas window and the layer tab. Try it!

You can also select multiple ducks. You can do this in several ways. First, you can hold down CONTROL and individually click the ducks that you want selected, but this can be tedious. However, there is a much faster method--just create a selection box by clicking the mouse and dragging it over the area of ducks that you want selected.

Go ahead and select two circles, and select all of their ducks. With several ducks selected, moving one duck will move all of the ducks. This behavior is dependent on the normal tool. Thus, a more descriptive name for this tool might have been the "move" or "translate" tool.

The Rotate and Scale tools work much like the Normal tool, except in the case where you have multiple ducks selected. It is much easier to just try it than read about it. Select a few circles, select all of their ducks, and try using the rotate and scale tools.

Note that, unlike the normal tool, the other duck manipulation tools DO have options associated with them. If a particular tool isn't doing what you want, take a look in the tool options tab to see if it is set up like you want it.

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