It’s quite easy to lose track of individual objects if your vector drawing is composed of many shapes. Sometimes you may even bury an object underneath content and, seemingly, have no other way to get to it than to {Click}

and drag objects out of the way so you can dig it out.  This isn’t always a good idea because it might have taken you hours to position the content in the first place. The Select Behind Tool is a far better alternative if you find yourself with this problem. 

Select the tool from the Toolbox and drag it to the shape that you suspect has something buried underneath it.  If there is a shape under it you will see it’s red highlight appear as you drag your cursor over it.  To select the object you simply {Click} while the object is highlighted. You can now drag it out from under the shape that’s hiding it.

Fireworks will keep any text that you create as editable in the original work documents that you save. This can be very useful if you have to go back and change some copy at some point in the future. You, cannot, however go into your document and make modifications to the physical appearance of editable text. You can change its stroke, fill, and effects settings but you cannot go in and, for example, extend the length of the descended on the letter P.  To do that you will have to convert your text to a path.  Select the text that you want to convert and then select Text/Convert Text to Path from the Menu. The box surrounding your text will change from that of an editable text block to that of a grouped collection of objects. You can then use the Sub selection

tool to select the individual letters as well as points on those letters. The text can then be modified like any other editable path. The illustrations on the next page will show you how the process would look on your screen

The one drawback to converting text to a path is the fact that it’s no longer editable, as text, after the conversion takes place. You’ll have to go through the whole process again if you find that the wording of your converted text needs to be changed.

Vector content is quite different from rasterized content. Not only in the way it can be edited and modified, but also in the way it’s organized. Experimenting with the Modify Bar will allow you to become proficient at organizing Vector Content and make composing your future projects much easier.