Lines and arrows

A line or arrow has two ends you can place by hand. Use them to point at a button, underline a word or connect two things on screen.

Where: Drag a round end handle on the canvasClip tab ▸ Shape ▸ Arrowheads
Agent tools: set_shape

To add one, see Shape clips.

Drag an endpoint

Select the line or arrow, with the playhead over it.
Drag the round handle at either end.

Only that end moves. The other end stays where it is, and so does the shape’s box. The drag is one undo step, “Move Endpoint”. Press Esc during the drag to put the end back, with no undo step.

A new line or arrow runs from the bottom-left corner of its box to the top-right corner. The start is the bottom-left end, and the end is the top-right one.

How the box limits an end

An end lives inside the shape’s box, so it stops at the box’s edge however far you drag. To take an end further, make the box bigger first, with the square handles or with Width and Height in the Shape section.

An end is kept as a place in the box, not a place on the canvas. When you resize the box, the line stretches with it and each end keeps its place. Rotating the box with the rotation grip turns the line.

The edge is also the easy way to get a level line. Drag both ends past the same edge of the box and they stop exactly in line. Nothing draws outside the box, though, so a line along its edge shows only half its stroke.

The square handles and the rotation grip work on a line’s box as they do on any shape. See Resize with the handles.

Set its arrowheads

Tick Arrowhead at start, Arrowhead at end or both in the Arrowheads section of the Shape sub-tab. A head shows only when Kind is Arrow, so a Line keeps its boxes ticked but draws no head. The rows are covered on Shape fill, stroke and size.

A head’s tip sits exactly on the end, and the line stops at the head’s base. A head’s length and its width are each four times the stroke’s width, so a 6 px stroke gives a head 24 px long and 24 px wide. It takes the stroke’s colour.

Good to know

An end can only be placed on the canvas. There’s no field for it in the inspector.
An end doesn’t snap to the canvas, its centre or other clips.
An action can’t move an end. With an action selected, dragging an end still changes the clip itself. An action can move, scale, rotate or fade the whole line through Transform.
With several clips selected, only the front-most selected clip shows handles.
A clip on a locked track shows no handles.

With an agent

An agent can place both ends exactly and set both heads in one set_shape call, with from, to, arrow_start and arrow_end. An end is two numbers measured across the box, where [0, 0] is the top-left corner and [1, 1] the bottom-right, so a new line runs from [0, 1] to [1, 0]. See Tools: text, shapes and clip names.