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Copying Shapes and Holes

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There are two ways of copying shapes: Using the Copy and Paste commands and using the Generate Shape dialog. See the “Generate Shapes” section for description of the Generate Shape dialog.


Select the shape you would like to copy. From the Edit menu, select the Copy option or press CTRL + C. Optionally, move the mouse pointer to the position where the centroid of the “to be pasted” shape should be pasted and click the left mouse button. From the Edit menu, select the Paste option or press CTRL + V. The operations actually performed by this sequence are:


1)The original shapes or/and holes are copied to the clipboard as polygons. The clipboard does not know if the polygons are shapes or holes.
2)The target position is specified using the mouse pointer. If this optional step is not performed, the target position is identical to the position of the shapes being copied.
3)The clipboard polygons are pasted as shapes (not holes) at the target position.


Skipping the optional specification of the target position is particularly useful for defining a shape within shape using a hole to define the inner shape geometry. See the “Defining Shapes within Shapes” section.


To paste a hole using this method, perform the same steps as above but before the pasting step, indicate that you are pasting a hole. To do this, in the Cross Section Input tab of the main toolbox, click the Hole icon or from the Shape menu select the Add Hole option.