Disappearing bounding box handles

[jackamus]

I know that I have bellyached about this in the past and even discussed it with a moderator but I still cannot see why such a useful feature should be left out. The answer that I was given was not very helpful!

So I repeat my complaint in the hope that others may take-up the cudgel and support me.

How do I find a vertical centre line in between the red and blue box? If I drag a group bounding box over the two boxes 8 handles appear 2 of which are in the centres of the top and sides. If I then try to drag a guide to snap to these centre handles, all the handles disappear when you click the mouse. Even if I actually create a group the handles still disappear

It must have taken a deliberate action on the part of the developers to do this. To me it is such an obvious useful feature and can think of no reason why great pains were made to exclude it.

Maybe there is a very difficult coding problem with keeping the handles in view.

Just saying again...

Guide lines.afdesign

[GarryP]

One simple solution is to:
* Draw a (temporary) straight line from the right of the red box to the left of the blue box.
* Then drag a guideline until it snaps to the centre of the line.
* Then delete the line.
There may be simpler methods but I rarely need to do this so I don’t know what they are.

[jackamus]

Thanks Gary,

I know many other methods to get a result by why should it be necessary in the first place when the the bounding has the required feature?

My workaround is to just drag a guide line to where I 'remember' the handle was and then check to see if I was accurate. If not I would just drag it a bit more. Normally I can get it first time but that is not the point!

[walt.farrell]

Are you talking about putting a Guide between the two rectangles, or a real line?

If you're talking about a real line, you can make a vertical line visually near the spot you want it, select that line, and with the proper snapping options enabled you can use the arrow keys to move the line left/right and Affinity will show you the distance between the rectangles and the line. Just move the line until the distances are equal.

[thatGuy]

If you enable bbox midpoints for snapping it will work just fine if you group the objects first

[Old Bruce]

Further to what @thatGuy and @walt.farrell have written about snapping and real lines here is a simple movie showing  how I would do this, the vertical line was drawn with the pen tool and was constrained to 90 degrees. The snapping is as thatGuy has it set up with the exception of I turned off the Move by Whole Pixels item. At the end I deleted the line.

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, jackamus said:

So I repeat my complaint in the hope that others may take-up the cudgel and support me.

If you want to see a change you need to post in the  Feature Requests and Suggestions forum, not here in Questions.

[G13RL]

Another way would be to use the "Space horizontally" button.

[jackamus]

Thank you all for the advice but nobody seems to grasp the fact that none of these workaround should be necessary when the mid points are visible!

These workaround are not intuitive in the light how easy it is to move guide lines to snap to a boundary but not to a mid point handle.

I have always had selected the 'Snap to bounding box and mid points' . I would expect to see the bounding box whilst moving the guide but it always disappears. Its a hit miss situation - you're not sure if the guide has snapped or not until you release the mouse button.

One of the reasons given for not allowing the handles to remain visible is what the developers call 'Screen clutter'.  How can it be 'clutter' when it  is visible except when you click the mouse?

There is no point in adding it to the 'Feature requests and suggestions' as I have already had a lengthy  discussion with the developers about it.

Can anyone, other than a developer, give me a good reason why these handles are not a very useful feature for moving guide lines to? Am I being unreasonable?

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, jackamus said:

There is no point in adding it to the 'Feature requests and suggestions' as I have already had a lengthy  discussion with the developers about it.

Then there is also no purpose in discussing it here, I'm afraid.

From my understanding they only look in feature requests to see what users are suggesting as changes, and no discussion here (or support by other users here) will affect that. You either want a change (and discuss it over there) or don't (and you can discuss it here).