Problem:
Saola Animate version: 3.0
OS: Windows 10
Notes:
Is it possible to select multiple items, shapes, like for example 5 rectangle shapes, and space them equally apart from each other within the selection of the rectangles, not across the whole canvas? ( I realize there is the option to space them horizontally but they space across the whole canvas)
In other words I want to keep the selected shapes in their existing area but space them equally apart from each other.
Hi Locky,
Please clear Align to Parent checkbox in Alignment toolbar before aligning selected elements.
Regards
Toan, thanks so much for that info. It may have been obvious to others here how to make that happen, but I will tell you I spent my whole Saturday morning and two hours of the afternoon trying to figure out how to do that and now you show me it was “just a check mark in a box”. 
When I read your reply, I immediately thought, hmmm I don’t think Toan understood what I meant, so you can imagine my total surprise when I put 15 rectangles on the canvas at random spacing and selected them all and then unchecked that MAGIC BOX that says Align to Parent and pressed arrange/align/space vertically and watched all 15 rectangles space themselves equally from the 1st to the last and all within the span from the 1st to the last rectangle instead of the whole canvas. Well listen, my birthday is tomorrow and I am pushing 70, this is a great birthday present, thanks!
Firstly, happy birthday for tomorrow and congratulations on the big seven-zero.
Secondly, for anybody that hasn’t done it - it’s worth reading the manual cover to cover every now and then. The knowledge in it has save my bacon on many occasions.
Lastly, be aware that the distribute evenly function changes the Translate X / Y values rather than the left / top values. Toan has answered this before for me I think. I only mention it because every now and then I find that something I’m doing doesn’t work the way I expected.
Thanks mackavi, that’s good info about the Translate X / Y values, I’ll remember that.
On a side note, I always had a hard time remembering the directions of X and Y, now I think of them this way:
The X (horizontal) looks like the greater than / less than symbols pointing at each other horizontally left and right like this >< = X
The Y (vertical) looks a V with a stem = Y pointing top to bottom.
You are absolutely right about reading the manual, and I did look at this in the manual but for whatever reason it did not compute mentally until Toan said to uncheck that Align to Parent box, once I did that, it all began to make sense, there is a lot more to this program than first meets the eyes! 
Happy 70th birthday to you, Locky!
The distribute function changes Translate X/Y values so that it can work with elements use ‘%’ unit for their left/top values. Unfortunately, it causes confusion in some cases such as when users use JavaScript to get and set the element position.
An option to convert the transform values to position values would be useful in a future version - especially now that the JS API has setTop, etc included.
Thanks all, and just to be clear, I said “I am pushing 70”, but not there yet…I actually turned 68. 
