Reset and commit transforms
Each time that you move, rotate, scale, or skew an object, Microsoft Expression Design remembers the object's original shape and geometry. This means that if you draw a rectangle and then move and rotate it, Expression Design lets you return the shape to its original geometry, even if you save the document, close it, and reopen it later. Understanding how Expression Design saves transformations together with the original geometry can be very helpful when you manipulate objects to create particular effects.
Resetting transformations
To reset transformations
Select a transformed object.
On the Arrange menu, point to Transform, and click Reset Transform.
The object reverts back to its "pure geometrical state," that is, the state before any transformations were applied to it.
Image fills that you have transformed with the Fill Transform tool and gradient brushes that have been transformed using the Gradient Transform .png "Cc294535.3f0a00bf-24ed-4487-94df-478ba622d10a(en-us,Expression.10).png")
tool are not reset when you click Reset Transform.
Resetting fill transformations
To reset a fill transformation
Select a transformed object.
Under Appearance in the Properties panel, click the fill transform drop-down menu button
.png "Cc294535.b86b90b8-18d5-4348-85a0-ada46b29149f(en-us,Expression.10).png")
, and then click Reset.
Resetting the bounding box
You can also update the object's underlying geometry, or merge the transformations with the object itself so that the original shape is forgotten.
To reset the bounding box
Select the object you want to change permanently.
On the Arrange menu, point to Transform, and then click Reset Bounding Box.
In many cases, an object will appear unchanged when you select Reset Bounding Box. However, in some cases, the appearance of brush strokes applied to an object might change significantly. For example, when you nonuniformly scale or skew an object that has a stroke, the stroke appears thicker in some areas and thinner in others. The stroke has been transformed together with the underlying path. However, when you select Reset Bounding Box, the transformation is forgotten (because it was merged into the underlying shape), and the stroke is applied untransformed to the path.
The original object (upper left). After scaling, the brush stroke is affected (middle). After selecting Reset Bounding Box, the stroke is applied untransformed to the path (right).
.gif "Cc294535.e02f462b-b3bf-4ad5-b391-10b2c5cd6a7b(en-us,Expression.10).gif")
Similarly, you could apply a 20-point brush stroke to an object, and then scale that object down uniformly to 50 percent. When you do so, the stroke width meter in the Properties panel remains set at 20 points, even though the stroke now appears to be 10-points thick (because the stroke is 20 points x 50 percent = 10 points). If you select Reset BoundingBox, the stroke is truly scaled down 50 percent together with the object size, and the Properties panel now displays a stroke width of 10 points.
After you select Reset Bounding Box, the Reset Transform feature no longer has any effect (until you apply new transformations to the object).
You can make sure that Expression Design automatically commits the transform every time you change an object (so that it never remembers the original shape).
To automatically commit the transform
On the Edit menu, point to Options, and then click General.
On the General panel, under General, select Automatically commit transforms.
This setting makes the stroke width meter in the Properties panel always display the true width, but sacrifices the capability of nonuniformly transforming stroke widths.