Naming after grouping

[Jim Monson]

After grouping a series of objects or texts it is now necessary to click on the grouped layer before giving it it name. This is particularly time consuming when grouping singular letters that imported into Publisher or Designer from Illustrator docs, full names which were placed on a line in Illustrator but appear in Affinity as single letters. It would be very helpful if the unnamed "group" were to automatically appear selected, and one had only to type in the name of the group. This would eliminate one of the steps the user must do. 

[MikeTO]

I would very much dislike this - I rarely name my groups and I don't want focus to be shifted to the Layers panel after I group my objects.

[Jim Monson]

Thanks, Mike, but for some of us who have complex docs and which, by using ayer names, keep us from going mad, naming a group in my opinion is the only way to keep layers organized. Without the names the layers become like a file cabinet full of folders but without tabs to know where to go. This seems sensible to me. Sorry to disagree, but your layers panel must be very simple or you are a genius remembering where things are in a highly complex doc such as creating a map with many different groups (names, roads, features, region, etc.).

[GarryP]

I think MikeTO’s objection – MikeTO, correct me if I’m wrong – is that they, and possibly many people, do not need/want to name their groups and it would adversely affect their workflows if they were forced to do something which they didn’t need to do.

Your suggestion may “eliminate one of the steps the user must do” if every user always wanted to name their groups but it would add an unnecessary step – each time the user created a group – for those users who didn’t want to work that way.

Basically, your suggestion might work nicely for you and the work you are currently doing but it might not be an improvement for the other million-plus Affinity users and the work they do.

Suggestions which may only positively affect a minority of users may be less popular than suggestions which positively affect – or don’t negatively affect – the majority of users.

An alternative to your suggestion would be to give the user the option of renaming groups as soon as they are created – maybe via an ON/OFF switch in the Preferences. I think that might be a reasonable compromise.

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, GarryP said:

I think MikeTO’s objection – MikeTO, correct me if I’m wrong – is that they, and possibly many people, do not need/want to name their groups and it would adversely affect their workflows if they were forced to do something which they didn’t need to do.

Your suggestion may “eliminate one of the steps the user must do” if every user always wanted to name their groups but it would add an unnecessary step – each time the user created a group – for those users who didn’t want to work that way.

Basically, your suggestion might work nicely for you and the work you are currently doing but it might not be an improvement for the other million-plus Affinity users and the work they do.

Yes, that was my objection, the change would adversely impact me and I suspect many users.

[Wosven]

Another option, since converting text to curves generate a group, would be for this group to get as name the first 10 (?) characters of the 1st line of text..

[Jim Monson]

13 hours ago, GarryP said:

An alternative to your suggestion would be to give the user the option of renaming groups as soon as they are created – maybe via an ON/OFF switch in the Preferences. I think that might be a reasonable compromise.

I like this suggestion, Gary. I realize that Affinity programmers have more important things to do, but I hope that they add this to their long list. I understand your objection, Mike and would not want to inconvenience other users, but I still have difficulty understanding how one can work with unnamed layers especially in a complex doc ... but to each his own.

[GarryP]

The reason for my objection about forcing all users to name groups every time they are created is that I rarely name my layers/groups.
Sometimes I do when things start to get complicated, or I want to be able to pinpoint a specific layer/group in a bunch of other similar layers but, for the most part, I don’t bother because it’s not needed.
I have some single-artboard Designer documents which have a lot of named layers/groups, and I have some multi-page Publisher documents containing thousands of layers – grouped in various ways – which have no named layers/groups at all.
Horses for courses, as they say.