Alignment vs clipped/masked objects.

[pekranodon]

I observed strange behavior when it comes to align objects to other objects that are clipped or masked. I prepared three cases, please watch my little demo video.

- Case 1: When I try to align the blue rectangle to the masked group, the object aligns to the most left edge of all the items in the group. I would have expected the object to align to the most left visible edge, but I guess the thought process here is that the objects in the group didn't really change their size. By selecting the mask, I can easily change the visible area.

- Case 2: The blue box aligns to the visible edge of the clipping rectangle, makes kind of sense, since clipping to my understanding means that nothing can be "outside" of the "carrier object". However I now can't easily resize the visible part without stretching everything else.

- Case 3: This is probably the most weird one....If I mask the objects, just like I did in case 1, but this time I mask the objects themselves, not the group, the alignment is just like in case 2 (blue box aligns to the most left visible point). In my mind this is inconsistent: In case 1, the mask of the group was ignored when it came to alignment, however here, the mask matters for the alignment.

Can anybody clear me up on this? Is this all intended behavior and I just don't get it right?

[pekranodon]

I made a minimal example for the inconsistency that I see here:

- If the green rectangle is masked, the blue box aligns to the visible portion of the rectangle.

- However, if the green rectangle is grouped first with the mask applied to the group, the rectangle does NOT align to the visible portion.

In my mind this should be consistent with the blue box always aligning to the visible green thing. It should not depend on if I am masking a group or a rectangle. To me it looks like the alignment tool just ignores the mask of groups ... 

 

[pekranodon]

Ok, my last post to this (fingers crossed), but I found something interesting again. 

I think this should be considered a bug. If you mask a rectangle object, the alignment tool uses the visual dimensions to align to. If you convert the same masked rectangle to curves, the curve's dimensions are used and the mask gets ignored.

 

(My screen recording software does not record the right-click pop-up window, but you can see on the layers panel that I just converted the "rectangle object" to "curve" at around 18s).

[DWright]

Is it possible for your to post a copy of your sample files so that I can follow your exact workflow on my computer

[pekranodon]

Yes, here you go. I added some explanation inside the files.

alignement test 3.afdesign alignement test 2.afdesign

[tycho5ive]

Issue still exists. The first image is the result of attempting to align two groups, one with a textured object achieved by masking a nested group. The align button respects the full dimensions of the masked objects (even when set to 'Selection Bounds,' which definitionally, masked objects are not), while the snap feature respects the dimensions of the mask itself, as would be expected and desired.