Strange: Group measures larger than its elements ungrouped?

[Lorox]

I just ran into some strange behaviour in Designer (which transports into Publisher):

I've got a simple graphic of a Union Jack flag consisting of 13 individual curves and one underlying rectangle as a background. These are the only elements on their layer. When I select all those parts individually (and simultaneously) the transformation panel shows a size of – say – 100 mm (width) and 50 mm (height). However, if I group these elements (or just select the layer they're on) the measurements shown in the transformation panel change to 101 mm (width) and 52 mm (height). Accordingly the selection marquee grows a bit on top and on one side to match the new measurements – while the elements making the flag remain exactly as before.

Does anyone know how this might be reasonably explained?

[GarryP]

I can see that the selection box is slightly larger in the second case.
Are the layers we see in the screen grabs the only layers, or is there another further down the stack?
As the background is white it is difficult to tell but what happens when you give the rectangle a different colour?
Are you able to show us the Transform Panel in each case?
Are you able to share the document with us? (Or the bit of it with the flag on.)

[John Rostron]

As a matter of interest, why are you creating the flag this way? The background is actually blue, with red and white crosses layered over it.

I would have created it:

1. Set background to blue.
2. Add thick white diagonal cross (this gives you the Saltire).
3. Add thin red diagonal cross.
4. Add thick white orthogonal cross.
5. Add thin red orthogonal cross.

This gives you five layers, which should make your life simpler. Note the terms 'thick' and 'thin' here are relative!

John

[GarryP]

John: As I read them, your instructions wouldn’t quite get you the Union Flag; notice how the lines of the ‘diagonal cross’ don’t quite ‘line up’ on either side.
There are specific rules for its reproduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Jack

[Lorox]

2 hours ago, John Rostron said:

As a matter of interest, why are you creating the flag this way? The background is actually blue, with red and white crosses layered over it.

Hi John,

as a matter of fact I didn't create that flag myself.. If I were to I'd probably do it different, too.

But as the "problem" I noticed seemed somewhat bizarre and I have no clue yet why that is so, I just took it as it was/is.

[Lorox]

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

I can see that the selection box is slightly larger in the second case.
Are the layers we see in the screen grabs the only layers, or is there another further down the stack?
As the background is white it is difficult to tell but what happens when you give the rectangle a different colour?
Are you able to show us the Transform Panel in each case?
Are you able to share the document with us? (Or the bit of it with the flag on.)

Hi Garry,

I created a new set of screenshots, where all relevant panels are visible. (They seem to be very large in the post - maybe that's due to the retina screen...)

The document (100 mm x 50 mm) itself is entirely empty except for those elements/layers you see in the screenshots. So it's quite a mystery to me where that "ghost space" is coming from that's added top and right when the group or the layer is selected instead of the individual elements.

Edited April 28, 2020 by Lorox
added more info

[Lorox]

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

As I read them, your instructions wouldn’t quite get you the Union Flag; notice how the lines of the ‘diagonal cross’ don’t quite ‘line up’ on either side.

Yeah, exactly. The diagonal "cross" of the thinner red lines actually isn't a cross in a strict geometric sense. If you made all of the 4 thin red lines run diagonally all over the flag you'd get a real diagonal cross of double line thickness.

[John Rostron]

 

Quote

The diagonal "cross" of the thinner red lines actually isn't a cross in a strict geometric sense. If you made all of the 4 thin red lines run diagonally all over the flag you'd get a real diagonal cross of double line thickness.

  @Lorox , @GarryP Yes, I recall now this is  how you tell that a Union Flag is up-side-down. The broad white stripes are on the top on the hoist (the side where it is attached) and on the bottom on the fly (the side that flaps about). In all good children's adventure stories, the heroes fly the flag up-side-down as a sign of distress and the villains do not notice.

I still maintain that you could create the flag by drawing two thin red crossed lines each with a horizontal bar in the middle, which would get hidden by the wider red (St George's) cross.

John

[GarryP]

Unfortunately I have not been able to replicate this.
A (Group) should have the same position and dimensions as the bounds of the layers within it.
The same goes for a (Layer).

I’ve tried a few things to somehow override this and cannot find a way to do it (which is what I would normally want, but not useful in this case).
You have no Effects applied so that shouldn’t be where the problem is.
If the layers had some ‘invisible’ thick stroke then I would expect the extra ‘space’ to be applied equally around the shapes, but it’s not.
Blend Modes and Opacity should not affect layers like this.
My current ‘best guess’ at the moment is that there’s some strange ‘unreported’ layer hiding in there somewhere.

Can you try releasing all the (Curve) and (Rectangle) layers from the (Group) and (Layer), delete the (Group) and (Layer), and then re-group the shapes individually? Is there a point in time during the re-grouping where the size of the group becomes what you would not expect?

[Andy05]

Just a wild speculation on my side here:

What's the size of the white rectangle in the background? Maybe it's bigger than the canvas and grouping all items reveals the "true" dimensions of all items whereas marking all items without grouping limits the dimension to the canvas? 

If that's the case, I'm not sure whether that'd be on purpose or if it's a bug.

[R C-R]

What happens if in the Transform panel you set the Y coordinate to 0.0 mm for the un-nested group layer while the anchor point is the top left one?

[MEB]

Hi Lorox,
Do you mind attaching the afdesign file please? I can provide an upload link if you wish to keep the file private. Thanks.

[Lorox]

5 hours ago, MEB said:

Hi Lorox,
Do you mind attaching the afdesign file please? I can provide an upload link if you wish to keep the file private. Thanks.

Here it is...

united-kingdom-flag_2.afdesign

[MEB]

The empty space comes from the rotated red diagonals (top and bottom one on the right side). If you reset their rotation (intersecting them with a rectangle with the same size of the canvas) or clip them inside a rectangle with the same size of the canvas) the group will have the correct dimensions. Sample file here (using intersection method): united-kingdom-flag_2_MEB_EDITED.afdesign

[Lorox]

18 minutes ago, MEB said:

The empty space comes from the rotated red diagonals (top and bottom one on the right side). If you reset their rotation (intersecting them with a rectangle with the same size of the canvas) or clip them inside a rectangle with the same size of the canvas) the group will have the correct dimensions

I see – I faintly remember that "resetting" the bounding box of previously rotated objects by a similar method proved useful sometimes in Adobe Illustrator, too.

What I do not understand, though, is why this empty "ghost space" is not taken into account when I select all those elements altogether WITHOUT grouping them. It's there when I select a single one of these two (the diagonal red stripes on the right; or the the group or the layer containing them) but it immediately disappears when I select any single or multiple other with it (even if it's just the second one giving us this effect).

Is there any logic behind this?

[thenickname]

I just stumbled upon a group being larger than the content in designer. See the attached Designer document.

I'm seeing this behavior in Designer 1.9.1 on Mac OS Big Sur (M1)

group-larger-than-content.afdesign

🤦‍♂️ I'm sorry I think I know what is going on with my file. It's just that the objects I use were rotated and therefore their bounding boxes made it appear that the surrounding group is larger than it should be. So, nothing wrong with affinity here...

Edited March 28, 2021 by thenickname
I was wrong ;)

[BMM]

On 4/29/2020 at 6:19 PM, MEB said:

The empty space comes from the rotated red diagonals (top and bottom one on the right side). If you reset their rotation (intersecting them with a rectangle with the same size of the canvas) or clip them inside a rectangle with the same size of the canvas) the group will have the correct dimensions. Sample file here (using intersection method): united-kingdom-flag_2_MEB_EDITED.afdesign

Oh, thank you very much @MEB! That was exactly my problem too! 

[MChelp]

On 4/29/2020 at 6:19 PM, MEB said:

The empty space comes from the rotated red diagonals (top and bottom one on the right side). If you reset their rotation (intersecting them with a rectangle with the same size of the canvas) or clip them inside a rectangle with the same size of the canvas) the group will have the correct dimensions. Sample file here (using intersection method): united-kingdom-flag_2_MEB_EDITED.afdesign

Dear @MEB, I have a similar issue with a die cut from a printing company. But it seems to me that I can't "reset their rotation (intersecting them with a rectangle with the same size of the canvas) or clip them inside a rectangle with the same size of the canvas)" or I don't get it / know how to do it. 

Any help here, pretty please?

PROBLEMS.afdesign

Edited September 10 by MChelp

[Hangman]

Hi @MChelp and welcome to the forums,

A couple of things...

1. Which file format do you need to export your file to, I'm assuming PDF?
2. Do you need to export the Black, Red and Green lines as separate files or will everything be exported as a single file?
3. The Purple line you've marked with a No. 1 in your first screenshot is the Artboard Bleed which you likely don't need so you can turn this off in the Bleed Tab of the Document Setup panel...
4. Your artboard is slightly larger than your artwork, is the intention that the Artwork fits the Artboard exactly?
5. In the exported file do you need to be able to show/hide the different colour die-cut lines individually?
6. There are a lot of unjoined lines in the artwork that could be joined to form one continuous line to make things easier to manage...

The rotated elements shouldn't impact the file when exported so it would be helpful to understand how the rotated elements affect what you need to do...

If the intention is to simply correct the rotated bounding boxes you can do this by selecting the respective layers one at a time then choosing Select > Cycle Selection Box followed by Select > Set Selection Box...

[MChelp]

Quote

If the intention is to simply correct the rotated bounding boxes you can do this by selecting the respective layers one at a time then choosing Select > Cycle Selection Box followed by Select > Set Selection Box...

@Hangman yes, this and it worked! thanks so much

[Hangman]

@MChelp,

Perfect, glad that did the trick...

[MChelp]

1 minute ago, Hangman said:

@MChelp,

Perfect, glad that did the trick...

Wait, it's not working After I group it, there's still this huge empty bounding box. See attached.

After I group it (together with other red lines), it has to be trimed just around the content (red lines), you know.

[Hangman]

15 minutes ago, MChelp said:

Wait, it's not working After I group it, there's still this huge empty bounding box. See attached.

Okay, so this is a known bug when Grouping elements, i.e., the Base Box is used and the Bounding Box isn't respected... but that then leads back to the other questions in the previous post...

If the intention is to export the file to a PDF selecting the Artboard itself or the individual Grouped layers then exporting the file will ignore the extended Bounding Boxes so shouldn't be an issue when trimming...

[MChelp]

@Hangman here's the problem: I'd like to create an artboard just around my lines. Here's what happens when I select all the content to create artboard based on the selection: https://www.loom.com/share/8da0dd24100b45dca6950f183e2d9be4 - there's an extra space on the left. This is a bug you say? Do we know any time frame when will it be fixed?

Black lines are die cut, red I forgot (I'll ask), green is bleed around the black cut. It's a template from a printing company I need to have on top of my designs. Makes sanse?

[Hangman]

Hi @MChelp,

Thanks for the screen recordings, I understand the issue better now and there are two observations...

1. The first is the bug mentioned earlier where the base box instead of the regular bounds bounding box is used when lines are grouped... I hope this will be fixed in v2.6 but there are no guarantees that will be the case...
    
2. The second issue appears to be that inserting an Artboard with the size set to Selection still adds a small area (border) outside the selection which appears to be influenced by the strokes cap and join style settings... This happens even with integer pixel values...

The bounding box issue is a real pain since, as you've seen, inserting an Artboard also ignores the regular bounds bounding box...

I went through your file and joined all the lines at their corner points where they weren't already joined but this still leaves the cut line with the same bounding box issue.

The only workaround I could think of was exporting the cut line as a PDF and then re-importing it into the file, which removes the rotated base box. Inserting the Artboard as mentioned above still adds the small additional border.

The only way to remove the small border to the top and left edges is to adjust the Artboard size manually...

Amended File
Die Cut.afdesign