Stokestack

Thanks. It was a sequence of coincidences to produce a perplexing result, for sure. While I find that there's a lot of counter-intuitive UI in Designer, this isn't an example. All of the behavior exhibited here is potentially useful and implemented reasonably.

Hi all. I needed to blank out an erroneous numeral on a bitmap, so I drew a white rectangle over it and then tried to put text over that. When I typed a character of text, the rectangle's fill disappeared from the canvas, but the object is still shown as filled in the toolbar. Screen grabs attached. fillDisappearsWithText.mov

Thanks for the reply. In my third post above (probably easy to miss in this long thread) I already note that I figured out the opacity issue. And I'm not selecting the rectangle at all. I'm using the Text tool to place text on top of the rectangle. I'm not using a selection tool; I'm using a Text tool. I expect a text tool to add text, not select arbitrary other objects. I don't expect anything to be converted from one kind of object to another, either. I'm just adding elements to the canvas.

Nice analysis, gents. However, we still have the fundamental problem of the text not being added...

Well, thanks for your time! I appreciate it.

Indeed! Version 1.7.1, Mac OS 10.14.6 Using a mouse.

Thanks, but please note that I didn't get any text to appear. The rectangle's fill simply disappears, but we now know that this is because I happened to hit a numeric key and changed the opacity. Yet another video, with history panel: rectangleMan.mov

Thanks. The layer list still just says rectangle. Here's the sequence again with all relevant UI. I draw the rectangle, then click with the Text tool and press the "1" key. stillRectangle.mov

Thanks, but where does it show me "doing" that? I never took any action to do that, and the screen shot of the layer list was taken after everything else occurred. So if it was changed into another type of object, that should be indicated in the layer list. And it wasn't; nor is it ever. I've repeated this sequence many times now. Nothing ever says "shape text."

Thanks for the reply. Is "shaped text frame" an actual object type in the application? The layer list still just says "rectangle." Even stranger is that this behavior is not reproducible anymore. Following the exact same steps depicted in the video, I get different behavior. Now the fill remains intact, and pressing a key has no effect... unless it happens to be the F key. If it's F, an origin or pivot appears in the middle. The slanted text here is a bitmap, just like the background in the example above. I press the F key. AHA! Just discovered the difference. I happened to be typing the numeral "1" or "0" in the example above. This appears to be setting the opacity. greenRect.mov

I never "turned the rectangle into a text frame." The video shows everything that happened (with the exception of tapping the key on the keyboard). As I stated, the toolbar shows that the rectangle has a white fill; but that fill disappeared from the canvas, allowing the underlying bitmap to show through. The screen grab of the layers was the last thing I captured.

Thanks, but why on earth would I have selected an item's color well and then sampled a color for it if I didn't want to apply it? Especially when this dialog loses the color as soon as it's dismissed!

1. When you use the eyedropper tool to sample a color for a stroke or fill, it's not applied to the selected object. 2. The next time you return to the color dialog, the last-sampled color has been discarded. The attached screen grab illustrates both problems. sampledColorLost.mov

Thanks! That's interesting functionality. I tried activating "show snapping candidates," and its usefulness is limited because the purple highlight exactly overlays the shapes; that's not really visible on black paths. But I can see where candidate-selection is potentially useful for limiting snap-happy behavior, so thanks for pointing it out.

Screen grab attached. The behavior appears to be nearly arbitrary. Sometimes an object won't snap to anything. Other times it'll snap to some and not others. In the attached screen grab, it won't snap into alignment with the top rectangle in the stack, but it'll snap to the others. Today I switched back to the same file with the same settings, and now it'll snap to the top two rectangles in the stack but not the bottom. Before that, it wouldn't snap to any; I had to click on one of the rectangles in the stack and then re-select the one I'm moving... then snapping worked to some objects. I tried activating "snap to object geometry," but that made it worse. snapFail.mov

Hi all. I've spent way more time than I should have trying to get a gradient fill to go vertically in Designer. I don't think I've ever before seen a graphics application that offered a gradient fill but lacked any way to control its angle. Even if there is a method buried somewhere in this application, it may as well not exist. It needs to be in the gradient-fill controls. Baffling.

No one is saying that the on-canvas controls aren't a good way to define gradients. The problem is that those controls don't appear when you select a gradient fill! If nothing else, simply displaying them automatically would alleviate most of this problem. Imagine a Print dialog that only let you select which printer to use, which pages to print, and how many copies... but didn't let you actually print. For that, you'd have to look elsewhere in the application for a "printer" tool, which contained some arbitrary subset of controls and the actual Print button.

Thanks for the info. The ToolTip should say "Show Paragraph panel" then.

What is this supposed to do? The ToolTip should tell us, at the very least.

Mmm, not really. This continuing problem reflects a strange lack of awareness of what constitutes a tool and what constitutes a UI to adjust an object's properties. In applications like this (vector or object-based), the tool palette is typically reserved for the means to create or select objects or nodes thereof, or change your view. It is not normally populated with "tools" that tweak intrinsic properties of an object. And, if an application wants to defy that convention, it should do so completely. But Designer doesn't; there are redundant and ineffective controls all over the place. There are property panels (of the sort you'd expect), and then these auxiliary functions dwelling in the tool palette for no particular reason. If the user clicks on the Fill color well in the toolbar, why not just present the on-screen Fill control right away? Why does he also have to guess that there's another thing to click on (in a totally different part of the UI) order to bring up the rest of the Fill controls?

Well, the latest update fixed one thing: It got rid of the bizarre "None" tab that was full of swatches. Otherwise (as your experience shows), Fill is still a mess.

Getting rid of the tabs in the Fill dialog and having the on-canvas gradient control appear when you select a gradient fill for an object would pretty much clear it up.

I'm a bit mystified that there's no way to trim the canvas to hold the objects in the document. In this example, how do you trim the canvas to only contain the shape?

So what? That's typically the last thing you do. It's a straightforward feature, the usefulness of which is well recognized and widely implemented in other applications. It has been requested numerous times. Don't want something? Then don't use it. Period. It's not going to change your workflow one tiny bit.

I don't want to export; I just want to trim the canvas.