TechNote (Archived)

Error Message When the Cursor Moves Over a Guide Path

Issue

FreeHand causes an error "Could not complete the command because an unknown command was encountered" when moving the cursor over the center of a circular guide path that is centered on the intersection of a horizontal and a vertical guide.

Reason

With Snap to Guides selected, create two intersecting guides, then create a circle centered on the intersection of the guides and movethe circle to the guides layer. Then with any tool except the Pointer, Pen, Bezigon, Freeform and FreeHand tools, when the cursor is moved over the intersection/center point, an error occurs. This did not happen with FreeHand 7.

Note:This is a known issue and we are looking into possible causes. It was reported in a call to Technical Support and the workaround is detailed in the solution below.

Solution

To avoid the error message and continue working unhindered, while the circle is selected, choose Xtras>Distort>Add Points before moving the circle to the Guides layer

To reproduce the problem, follow these steps:

1	To set up the document, Choose View>Snap to Guides and View>Page Rulers.
2	Create a Horizontal and a Vertical guide by click-dragging from the horizontal page ruler and the vertical page ruler. Set the guides to intersect near the center of the page.
3	Select the Ellipse tool and create a circle that is centered on the intersection of the two guides by holding down Alt+Shift while drawing the circle
4	Click on the Guides layer in the Layers Panel to move the circle to the Guides layer.
5	With any tool selected except the Pointer, Pen, Bezigon, Freeform and FreeHand tools, move the cursor over the intersection of the guides and the center of the circular guide: An error window appears:"Could not complete the command because an unknown command was encountered"

To avoid invoking the error message include the following step:

3a	With the circle still selected, choose Xtras>Distort>Add Points to add more points to the arc of the circle.

Note:On Windows NT, the same error has occurred randomly when drawing an circle on top of the guide circle. When the cursor moves over the intersection of the guides, the error did not occur.