Designer: How are you supposed to resize multiple objects?

[Old Bruce]

If we had Paste Replace (and for completeness) Paste at cursor with a right click I would be much happier. Paste Replace would take care of your resize problem.

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, Stokestack said:

I'm sure users were clamoring for the most obscure possible resizing functionality on the planet.

It may not be something you want to do but is neither obscure nor preposterous to want to resize a number of selected objects proportionally instead of to the same absolute dimensions. For example, consider making a caricature of a face that has 2 eye objects, a nose object & a mouth object. Resizing those objects proportionally is a quick & easy way to get several different looks from the same basic design.

A quick, very crude example of this:

Or more generally, consider a schematic or architectural drawing with number of elements of different sizes. Resizing a selection of them proportionally so they better fit with changing requirements in the overall design is a common enough need to justify this functionality.

Likewise, resizing to absolute dimensions is also a common enough need to justify its inclusion. We need both, not just one or the other.

[Stokestack]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

It may not be something you want to do but is neither obscure nor preposterous to want to resize a number of selected objects proportionally instead of to the same absolute dimensions.

Who said that was preposterous? No one. Strawman down.

There's no indication that the current "method" will do that kind of scaling, so it doesn't address your desire for it anyway. After all, you did not realize that the Transform panel behaved this way either; why would anyone else guess it? Our mutual experience with Affinity's design here supports the contention that it's obscure. Preposterous is up to the observer, but yeah I'd say it's preposterous.

We already have a way to resize things proportionally: scale. This is an expected and well-understood feature of an untold number of graphics applications. Why do you ignore that?

[R C-R]

29 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

Who said that was preposterous?

You did, less than 24 hours ago:

20 hours ago, Stokestack said:

That is pathetic. And the behavior you've discovered is straight-up preposterous.

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Stokestack said:

We already have a way to resize things proportionally: scale.

Yes, using Transform Objects Separately we can scale multiple items of different sizes in one step without changing the relative spacing between them, just like in my crude example. But before the transform separately feature was available, there was no way to scale multiple items in one step that did not also change their spacing. That's what users were asking for, what we got when that feature was added, & why the behavior is neither obscure nor preposterous.

EDIT: If my explanation is not clear, maybe this will better illustrate what I mean. Scaling by transforming separately does not change the relative spacing between the objects; by scaling them together it does. 

Edited August 28, 2021 by R C-R
second edit to fix the missing "not" -- thanks Alfred!

[Stokestack]

20 hours ago, R C-R said:

You did, less than 24 hours ago:

That is pathetic. And the behavior you've discovered is straight-up preposterous.

Wrong. I said THE BEHAVIOR OF DESIGNER here is, and you know it. Nobody said THE DESIRED FUNCTION is preposterous, which you also know because I already noted that it's an expected and desirable feature of any application like this. In fact, if Designer worked the way other applications do (and I expected and described), you would have that functionality: objects being scaled in place without changing their relative spacing. Did you watch the video? That's exactly what happened in Sketch.

Let's head off any feigned confusion: You'd select all the objects, go to the Transform panel, and enter some value for Scale. The objects would scale in place. The change of relative spacing in Designer is another side effect of the dumb transformation of the bounding box around the objects instead of the objects themselves.

You can continue to float strawmen and play dumb here, but the fact is that even you didn't know how this inept UI worked; but now you're pretending that it's a broadly understood and demanded implementation of a function. It's not even named correctly, so no... it isn't.

--END--

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

Wrong. I said THE BEHAVIOR OF DESIGNER here is, and you know it.

You also said what is preposterous is up to the user to decide. A number of us have decided the current behavior is not preposterous, & that both the current behavior and a method to resize all selected objects to the same size would be useful.

[R C-R]

29 minutes ago, BofG said:

Hey I need that! Don't go making too many waves about it, if they take it away to please you I'll cry.

Just curious but how often do you need that vs. needing to resize multiple objects all to the same size?

[R C-R]

19 minutes ago, BofG said:

Close to infinity. I work mostly with text, so resizing to all the same size is just done with the font size, then I resize the selection to fit the space required.

Personally, at least in AD I work mostly with a lot of differently sized & shaped vector objects. I rarely have any need to set a selection of them to the same absolute size; but quite often I do want to resize (or otherwise transform) the selection as if it was a single object to fit into some space in the design.

Much less frequently, I want to resize (or otherwise transform) a selection using the current transform individually behavior, but I do use it from time to time.

[lacerto]

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[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Lagarto said:

In this sense, Affinity apps do not support setting the width and/or height individually, but just scaling, similarly as Illustrator.

So if in this sense the scaling behavior is similar to the Illustrator behavior, then this is a pretty strong argument that the Affinity behavior is not wrong, obscure, preposterous, etc. 

But of course, that in no way invalidates the usefulness of adding an additional feature that allows setting each selected item's width and/or height to the same value.

Maybe this could be implemented in the UI by adding a "Scale" checkbox or button to the context toolbar in addition to the Transform Objects Separately button? I think I would rather see it there than in the Transform panel. What do you think?

[lacerto]

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[R C-R]

35 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

The Transform panel of Affinity apps would definitely benefit from adding percentage boxes and "Transform each" option in the panel itself, and could additionally have "Relative" and "Absolute" options that would allow using the Transform panel also as a global property box so that it would also be possible to e.g. reset rotations to 0 (or any arbitrary angle) for all selected objects individually, and optionally also apply transformations to copies. 

Personally, I would prefer to see at least some of this in the context toolbar for a couple of reasons. One is the Transform panel may not always be open; another is that I don't want to see it any more cluttered, complicated, or larger than it already is. If all those options were in that panel, unless multiple objects were selected some of them would be irrelevant, so they are dependent at least to that extent on that context; thus why I would expect to see them on the toolbar.

49 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Transformations are (perhaps) oddly a bit neglected feature in many 2D graphic design apps...

I think with the exception of the 'absolute' or 'global' transforms the Affinity apps are fine in this respect. Add support for that & I don't see much to complain about.

[telemax]

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

But of course, that in no way invalidates the usefulness of adding an additional feature that allows setting each selected item's width and/or height to the same value.

As well as rotations. For example, in some cases this will save hours of work.

 

[fde101]

19 hours ago, R C-R said:

Maybe this could be implemented in the UI by adding a "Scale" checkbox or button to the context toolbar in addition to the Transform Objects Separately button? I think I would rather see it there than in the Transform panel. What do you think?

I agree that having both options would be good, but I think it should go in preferences rather than anywhere else on the UI.  I would rather see expressions evaluated/applied per object when transform separately is enabled, rather than once.

In other words, currently if I typed w+1, the primary selected object would have 1 added to its width, and the rest of the objects would be scaled proportionally to the relative scaling factor that effectively resulted in.  I would rather see 1 added to the width of each individual object in that case (which is not the same thing).

This would effectively solve the problem both ways: if the preference were set to use the current behavior (scaling relative to the primary selected object when transform objects separately is enabled), an expression like 6+0 or 6*1 could be used to set all of the objects to 6 individually, while if the preference were set to behave the way @Stokestackhas been advocating for, an expression like w*2 could be used to double the width of each individual object.

I see no particular value in the current behavior of only applying the expression to the current primary selected object, other than that I suspect it was simpler to implement behind the scenes.

Another good set of options to have would be to add Make Height Uniform, Make Width Uniform, Span Heights, Span Widths, etc. options to the alignment popup.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, fde101 said:

I agree that having both options would be good, but I think it should go in preferences rather than anywhere else on the UI.

I would much rather have this option in the context toolbar or even in the Transform panel. I would hate to have to open the Preferences panel & find this option among all the other preferences to change it. Depending on the workflow, I might have to do that several times while editing the same document or a series of different ones, so this would just slow me down. Besides, being buried in a preference setting provides no indication of which way it is set currently, while either of the other two alternatives would do that.

[Gear maker]

1 minute ago, HoneyMates757 said:

i already tried but its not working

Can you elaborate on this?  What's not working?  Are the objects petty much the same size and shape, or very different?  Does the layers panel show all objects are selected?  Are they compound objects "Curves" or "Curve" in the layers panel?  Is the bounding box not showing on one object?  Etc.  The more info the better.  Pictures are nice. 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, Gear maker said:

Can you elaborate on this?  What's not working?

@HoneyMates757 is a spammer whose forum posts (innocuous or otherwise) have all been removed.

[Gear maker]

1 minute ago, Alfred said:

is a spammer whose forum posts (innocuous or otherwise) have all been removed.

Thanks Alfred, how did you know this?  Wow.  I don't even think of having such a problem on the forum.  

[Alfred]

8 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

Thanks Alfred, how did you know this?

Very easily, Mike! I saw the spam post (which I reported) and then subsequently noted that it had been removed. At first the earlier posts were still extant, but they’ve obviously gone now, too.

It’s quite common for spammers to post things of little substance, or verbatim copies of genuine users’ posts, to establish a presence before attempting to post messages that include spam links.

[fde101]

6 hours ago, R C-R said:

much rather have this option in the context toolbar or even in the Transform panel

I wouldn't want to waste more space making the transform panel larger to show the option.  Adding it to the context toolbar when the transform objects separately option is enabled would probably be reasonable, but I still think the solution with the equations would make it less convenient than simply picking one of the modes as a preference and using those instead...  and it is one more thing to crowd the context toolbar which is already overly full with options depending on what is selected, particularly for laptop users...

It might make more sense to offer it on the context toolbar if it could be customized as many have asked for already.

[Fixx]

I would prefer to have transform panel with all relevant options. Panel can be extensible i.e. has more esoteric options hidden by default. I am not a big fan of toolbars, I prefer dedicated panels which can be hidden and called with kbd shortcuts.

[lacerto]

(,,,)

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, Fixx said:

I would prefer to have transform panel with all relevant options. Panel can be extensible i.e. has more esoteric options hidden by default. I am not a big fan of toolbars, I prefer dedicated panels which can be hidden and called with kbd shortcuts.

Wherever possible, I prefer to have option buttons or dropdown menus on a toolbar so I can just click on them without having to make sure some panel is open, the option I want is accessible, & the panel is positioned so it doesn't cover up or obscure the document.

At least to me, it just seems like the fastest, most efficient way to work.

[lacerto]

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