Every version, there are a few features which don't make it to the back of the box, and because of this, you may never know they exist.  I'll go through a few of the lesser known features here.

Node Size

These days, High DPI monitors are becoming more and more popular and as a result it may be harder to select nodes when using the shape tool (really, it's the monitor, not my eyes).  Well, in X5 you can now increase the node size.  In the menu, go to "Tools", "Options", navigate to the "Edit" page.  There you'll find a control to select small, medium and large node sizes.

Freehand Tool

As you may know, the curves drawn by the freehand tool have been improved for X5.  A few other improvements were added too:

• Holding shift allows you to erase a portion of the curve, this has been improved over X4.
• While drawing with the left mouse button down, you can hold the right mouse button to reposition the whole curve.  This already worked for many tools, but didn't previously work for freehand.
• There is a new control on the toolbar which makes the bounding box not show after a curve is drawn.  I find this very handy.

You can also hit backspace now while drawing with the polyline tool to erase the last line or curve segment.

2-Point Line Tool

You're probably wondering why you need another way to make straight lines, after all, you can do it with 3 or 4 other tools already.  The real power of the 2-point line tool is the tangent and perpendicular modes.  When you select the 2-point line tool, you'll find three buttons on the toolbar that look like this:

The first mode is a regular line tool, the second mode allows you to draw perpendicular lines off of curves, and third mode allows you to draw tangents off of curves.  Try this:

1. draw a circle
2. switch to the 2-point line tool and select the tangent mode
3. using the 2-point line tool, click and drag on the edge of the circle
4. now while still hold the left mouse button down, drag anywhere on the page

As you can see, the line keeps itself tangent to the circle.  This can be useful to many types of drawing which require precision.

There are a couple of useful modifier keys:

• Ctrl - this will constrain the line angle to the current angle
• Shift - this will constrain the line angle to the initial angle

3-Point Curve Tool

The 3-point curve tool has learned a couple of new tricks:

1. Holding shift while placing the third point will keep the parabola symmetrical.
2. Holding ctrl while placing the third point will create a circular arc instead of a parabola

Great for making crescent moons.

1-Shot Eyedropper

Perhaps my favourite secret tool is the 1-shot eyedropper.  Try this:

1. Draw any shape
2. Press ctrl+shift+e
3. Click anywhere (hopefully on a colour)

The shape is now filled with that colour and you're back to your last tool.  The 1-shot eyedropper can be used in several places where it is sometimes difficult to eyedrop a colour, for example, you can use it when you have a colour node in the interactive gradient selected, or when you have a mesh node selected.  If you prefer to access the tool as a button, you can find it on the mesh toolbar, which you can customize to other locations if you desire.

Segment Delete

While node editing a curve with the shape tool, you can now delete a line or Bezier segment of the curve by clicking on the segment and pressing the delete key (requries SP1).

Virtual Segment Delete

The VSD tool has been completely rewritten for X5-SP1.  Many of the errors that you may have encountered in the past are gone and the tool is much more accurate.  The tool also has a few new tricks:

1. Holding alt and dragging will draw a marquee curve.  Any virtual segment which intersects that curve will be deleted.
2. Often after deleting segments, you may want to join nodes.  Holding shift enters node welding mode.  If you hover over two overlapping unjoined nodes, the cursor will change indicating that you can join those nodes by left clicking.
3. You can hold shift and drag a marquee rectangle over several overlapping nodes to join them all at the same time.

Customizable Drawing Scale Control

If you work with scale a lot, you may find the drawing scale control helpful.  You can find it by searching for "Drawing scale" in customization.

Antialiased Pattern Fills

In previous versions, Draw's pattern fills were not very useful because they didn't antialias.  Now in X5, the pattern fills finally look good.

Nice!

That's it for now.  Enjoy.