[AD 1.7.3.481 / 1.8.0.526 beta] border width below 0.1 gets truncated to 0 in UI

[Friksel]

When setting a stroke width below zero, the textbox shows this when it's above 0.1. So widths like 0.2, 0.3, 0.123 are shown as expected.

But when the width is below 0.1 Affinity suddenly acts like there is no border at all; it shows zero instead of the real value.

I'm using widths below 1 a lot for digital animation work (using svgs), like zoom in animations, also widths with values below 0.1. So for the work I do this is a pretty common scenario I bump into many times. And when widths are below 0.1 there's no way in reading somewhere in the user interface there is in fact a width (not zero) and what that value currently is set to.

This is what we see now when the strokewidth is below 0.1, which is obviously telling us users there is no width, while in fact there is:

I understand developers don't want to show all digits and have to deal with rounding the real values, but truncating to zero is just not right. Why not display '< 0.1' instead so the user can see there is in fact some width so not zero. Than when a user hovers over the width slider or the textvalue inputbox with a pointer it can show the real, full number of the width, in a tooltip so we can always see what value the width is really set to. Like this: it shows '< 0.1' if the value is below 0.1 and when the user hovers it shows the real/full value:

I don't believe this is a lot of work to build in the software, but it would definitely help communicating to us users a lot better (and not confusing in acting like the border is zero, when there is a border set).

 

[edit] I see now I accidentely posted this in the publisher forum, although it was meant to be in the Designer forum. I leave it like this because it affects all three programs anyway.

[walt.farrell]

You need to go to Preferences, User Interface (UI), and adjust the number of decimal points displayed for values displayed in points. It defaults to 1, where anything from 0 to .05 would round down to 0, and anything from .05 to .099 would round up to .1.

[carl123]

11 hours ago, Friksel said:

So widths like 0.2, 0.3, 0.123 are shown as expected.

That would suggest you have set your decimal points to at least 3 decimal places. Is that correct or is the above a mistake?

 

 

 

 

 

10 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

 It defaults to 1, where anything from 0 to .05 would round down to 0, and anything from .05 to .099 would round up to .1.

A small correction...

"It defaults to 1, where anything from 0 to .04 would round down to 0, and anything from .05 to .09 would round up to .1."

[Friksel]

12 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

You need to go to Preferences, User Interface (UI), and adjust the number of decimal points displayed for values displayed in points. It defaults to 1, where anything from 0 to .05 would round down to 0, and anything from .05 to .099 would round up to .1.

Thanks @walt.farrell. Never knew about that setting. That helps a lot indeed!

 

Quote

That would suggest you have set your decimal points to at least 3 decimal places. Is that correct or is the above a mistake?

@carl123 Obviously the way the software is build now we should. It would be nice if we didn't need to, because 0.2 doesn't have to be written as 0.200, but I understand the precision float number problem and I think the solution to make users pick the precision themselves is not bad at all. 

The only thing I still think is strange is that when a value is rounded to zero the textbox doesn't give users any clue that the value isn't zero. In my opinion zero is a special case, because when setting a border to zero that implicates that there is NO border at all and having no borderwidth would result in no border export either. So if I were Affinity I would handle the zero differently and add some indication in the UI that the value is not exactly zero, but rounded to zero in the display only.

Like showing an asterix after the value textbox or something, to indicate that the value is not exactly zero, but a small number, rounded to zero.

'0 px' *

But we can't have everything and being able to set the decimals ourselfs helps a lot. Thanks again @walt.farrell ! Great tip!

[R C-R]

7 hours ago, Friksel said:

The only thing I still think is strange is that when a value is rounded to zero the textbox doesn't give users any clue that the value isn't zero.

True, but the stroke Style icon buttons to its left does do that. The first one (the circle with the red slash) won't show as selected if the stroke has any non-zero width, even if it is 0.00001 px.

[Friksel]

On 12/19/2019 at 5:00 PM, R C-R said:

True, but the stroke Style icon buttons to its left does do that. The first one (the circle with the red slash) won't show as selected if the stroke has any non-zero width, even if it is 0.00001 px.

That's not true. Try putting the strokewidth to 1px: you see the stroke buttons are automatically switched to the line-icon to indicate there is a stroke now. But when setting the stroke back to 0px after that, it never switches back to the non-stroke iconbutton. So there's no way to tell than if the stroke is 0px or 0.00001px.

If this would work as you described and therefor as expected, that would indeed be a nice addition to the interface to be able to tell if there is a border or no border width. But it's obviously not working at the moment. So just filed a bug: