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What's up with Designer's apparently arbitrary snapping?


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Hi all. I wanted to lay out some labels using a template.

I found that the snapping of my paragraph text object to each label was inconsistent: In some places there's no snapping, in others there's one-dimensional snapping, and finally in others there's two-way snapping. Any idea why?  Screen grabs attached. Designer 1.8.3 under Mac OS 10.15.5.

Thanks!

arbitrarySnappingSettings.png

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You are only snapping to a Candidate List of 6 items.

I am guessing that the boxes where snapping is not occurring are not Candidates, therefore the behaviour you are seeing is correct. Enabling Show snapping candidates will confirm this as they will be highlighted in purple.

You can read about Candidates here https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/pages/DesignAids/snapping.html

 

Win10 Home x64   |   AMD Ryzen 7 2700X @ 3.7GHz   |   48 GB RAM   |   1TB SSD   |   nVidia GTX 1660   |   Wacom Intuos Pro

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Thanks for the reply and the reference. I see that the default snapping mode is "Candidate List," with a limit of six candidates. I've encountered two problems with this functionality just now.

1. Simply the act of toggling "Show snapping candidates" has caused even partial snapping to the label box to stop working for all objects. But I guess it wasn't supposed to be working anyway...

2. The documentation says that an object becomes a candidate if you hover over it, but as you can see in the original video, the non-snapping label does not become a candidate despite ample time moving the text around on top of it.

Only the three text boxes are shown as snapping candidates for each other now.

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28 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

2. The documentation says that an object becomes a candidate if you hover over it, but as you can see in the original video, the non-snapping label does not become a candidate despite ample time moving the text around on top of it.

Hover over the lines of the object (your template).  Seeing as you could have many overlapping objects it doesn't just grab anything that you hover over in the middle.  When the object, your template box, is selected as a candidate it will turn violet if you turn on the Show snapping candidates.

As far as #1 is concerned I'm sure there is an explanation if we saw what was happening.  Other than turning the outline of the object violet it won't change anything in how the snapping occurs.  Try turning it on and hover over a block of you template.  Does it turn violet and allow snapping to the edges and midlines?

iMac (27-inch, Late 2009) with macOS Sierra

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22 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

Hover over the lines of the object (your template).  Seeing as you could have many overlapping objects it doesn't just grab anything that you hover over in the middle.  When the object, your template box, is selected as a candidate it will turn violet if you turn on the Show snapping candidates.

Thanks. That's somewhat reasonable, and it does change when you fill the object: Then the snapping will work when you hover anywhere over its interior. I expected the snapping to apply the same logic to identify candidates as it does to perform the snapping itself. What if two objects' outlines entirely overlap?

22 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

As far as #1 is concerned I'm sure there is an explanation if we saw what was happening.  Other than turning the outline of the object violet it won't change anything in how the snapping occurs.

Well, it's not supposed to. In this case it did, but I'm out of time for this particular investigation. Maybe activating that feature caused an iteration over the candidate collection that cleared out erroneous entries. Only the developer can say.

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