You might want to ‘fade out’ — for example, a floorplan that has just been imported from DWG or PDF — to de-emphasize the imported objects in the drawing and make the things you create stand out.

One approach is to add a semi-transparent object on top of the imported drawing. Stardraw Design 7.4 supports the ARGB color model, where ‘A’ — the Alpha channel — is opacity. You can define any color you want in Red, Green and Blue (RGB) as normal, but also prefix that with a value from 0–255 for how opaque or transparent the color will be.

To ‘fade out’ your drawing:

1. Open the Layers dialog (Ctrl+L) and create a new layer called, for example, ‘Contrast’. Set it to be the Current layer and close the Layers dialog.
2. Choose the Rectangle tool and draw a rectangle that covers the part of the drawing you want to fade out.
3. With the rectangle selected, in the Properties Grid on the right of your screen set the Line and Fill colors:
   • For Line Color you might want to set White, making the rectangle’s edge effectively invisible.
   • For Fill Color use the ARGB value for a semi-opaque white, e.g. 127,255,255,255. The 127 value of A means the color is 50% transparent.
4. Using the Layers dialog, set the ‘Contrast’ layer to be Locked — this means you won’t select or change the rectangle by mistake.

Now you’ll see objects behind the rectangle lightened and less prominent in the overall drawing.

This example uses a rectangle, but you can use any filled object like a Circle, Ellipse or Polygon.

The advantage of this technique is that it’s a one-stop fix. The disadvantage is that the new object can be a little intrusive while you’re working on the drawing, hence putting it on a locked layer; this shows a ‘No Entry’ sign when your cursor is over the object and means that nothing on the layer can be selected, moved or edited. If that’s too intrusive, you can hide the ‘Contrast’ layer while you work and only show it when you go to print.

Also note that objects which existed before the rectangle was created are ‘behind’ it, so will appear faded, but objects you create afterwards will be on top of it, so will not appear faded. The ‘behind’/‘in front of’ stack is called the Z-Order, and you can change the order in which things appear, relative to each other, using the Order commands in the Arrange menu — ‘Move to Front’, ‘Move Backward’ and so on.