If you’ve been around Keynote for awhile you may remember LOOONG long ago that Keynote 1 shipped with a file of “extras” which included some nice graphics to use in your own presentations. Those were missing in Keynote 2 and there was some degree of lamenting over it. At the time, I was toying around with ways to create shapes for use in Keynote and hit upon a combination of Illustrator to .wmf to PowerPoint then a Keynote import. Even though limitations in the .wmf-to-windows-object conversion forced me to create very large shapes in Illustrator before the export (that would then be shrunk in PowerPoint), it worked in a majority of the cases. I then set about to re-create the original images as shapes so that the user would no longer need to have a limited number of colors or sizes. It was going along nicely when I ran into the “minority” of cases... shapes with “holes”.

You see, when you create a normal closed shape, there’s a start point and an end point and they meet somewhere.

As long as those two meet, there’s no problem as you just go from point to point until you’re finished. However, one look at a dollar sign

(either scroll up or look at this one) lets you know that you can’t draw it simply. Sooner or later, you’ve gotta pick up and move somewhere else, but how?

It turns out to be pretty simple in the Keynote XML. Without getting TOO deep, you just replace one of your commands to draw a line from here to here with a command to MOVE from here to here. That’s fine if you happen to know all the coordinate points you’re trying to create by heart... I didn’t. I had to use the tools I had on hand to create the coordinates then go back and hand edit the XML until it drew like I wanted. In the end, not only did I learn a lot about how shapes were created, I also had myself a bona-fide properly created shape to round out the collection! (the cent sign was a lot easier than the dollar, only one hole)

Another little trick I found out while going through this process was that Keynote’s XML also supports rounded

and mitered bezels. See that example to the left? Where two segments meet is the bezel and, while there IS support for the “roundy” one on the left and the “sharpy” one on the right in the XML, you can’t get at it using Keynote’s interface. Seeing this, I did what anyone would do, include the shapes with both rounded AND sharp bezels!

To round out the presentation, I included two slides at the end to show off a bit of what you can do when your symbols are editable and that was that. For Keynote 3

, I changed the theme to one of the new standard themes and added a bit more fun to the last slide. If you’re using Keynote 2, grab the version on the left. If you’re using Keynote 3, click the icon on the right.