What does the round dot in group icons in the layers panel mean?

[ZhangX]

Some of my Group icons in designer's layers panel have a round dot within them. Some others do not.
What is the difference?
Thank you!

[R C-R]

The dot means the layer is visible; if you click on it, it hides the layer ... & while the dot is still there, its contrast with the background is so low that it looks like it too has vanished.

Tip: if you hover the pointer over the dot for a bit, a tooltip will pop up telling you it is "Toggle Visibility".

[laurent32]

I think the question concerns the white dot on the folder icon, on the left…

[NotMyFault]

The Icons change depending on content.

• groups without any visible layers show group symbol with empty symbol
• groups with adjustments only show symbol for adjustments
• groups with any vector or bitmap content show a thumbnail preview

The actual symbols could be OS or Affinity Version dependent.

 

[lepr]

5 hours ago, ZhangX said:

Some of my Group icons in designer's layers panel have a round dot within them. Some others do not.
What is the difference?

The dot indicates the group contains at least one mask and no other type of object. You will see the same dot on a mask's thumbnail.

The blank indicates the group contains at least one vector or raster object. It may also contain other types of objects. The Layers panel burger menu has an option for displaying a preview of the group's content in the thumbnail.

[ZhangX]

Thank you so much, everyone. You are all super professional, friendly, and helpful.

[DarkClown]

Has anyone got an idea what this one stands for?:

[Return]

A group with only a (vector) mask applied.

[thomaso]

11 minutes ago, DarkClown said:

Has anyone got an idea what this one stands for?:

Mask …   https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Layers/aboutLayers.html&title=About layers

[DarkClown]

2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Mask …   https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/pages/Panels/layersPanel.html

Nope, thats a different Icon ... the one I postet is a group icon with a hole in the middle ...

[thomaso]

1 minute ago, DarkClown said:

Nope, thats a different Icon ... the one I postet is a group icon with a hole in the middle

Compare above:

On 2/15/2023 at 7:44 AM, NotMyFault said:

The Icons change depending on content.

• groups without any visible layers show group symbol with empty symbol
• groups with adjustments only show symbol for adjustments
• groups with any vector or bitmap content show a thumbnail preview

... means there may be combinations of 'group' + 'icon'

[Old Bruce]

17 minutes ago, DarkClown said:

Has anyone got an idea what this one stands for?:

 

5 minutes ago, DarkClown said:

Nope, thats a different Icon ... the one I postet is a group icon with a hole in the middle ...

If you click on the disclosure triangle you may find out.

A group with a mask in it. Note that it is not masking the group, the mask is just in the group.

[DarkClown]

2 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

If you click on the disclosure triangle you may find out.

You mean like this?:

[Return]

Any layer can be positioned in the mask position aka dragged over the thumbnail of the group.
This can be a group, a shape or a pixel mask but if there's nothing else in the group itself, it will show the mask icon on the thumbnail.

Adding items to the group is done by dragging to the title of the layer.
Masking the layer/group is done by dragging to the thumbnail.
 

[Old Bruce]

5 minutes ago, DarkClown said:

You mean like this?:

Yes. So a Group Icon with a hole in it means there is something in the Group but there is nothing to display.

[Return]

Just now, Old Bruce said:

there is something in the Group

There are no items inside the group but only nested in the mask position.
 

[Old Bruce]

1 minute ago, Return said:

There are no items inside the group but only nested in the mask position.

I beg to differ. There are groups in the group with the hole in it. From the post where I only quoted the text:

You can try it yourself. Drag an empty group into an empty group.

[DarkClown]

Fair enough - I'm just trying to undestand 🙂
So if you have an empty group you get the crossed out filled circle. If you place this group in another group this new group is obviously not empty, but carring no objects so you get a hole in the group symbol ....

It gets slightly confusing, when you now add an object in the second group. Frankly spoken, I don't get what I see here ... (the orange rectangle is not visible ... ) all groups have 100% Opacity.

And even more strange: I can set a filling and stroke to the topmost GROUP!

I guess I'm getting to old ...

[NotMyFault]

1 minute ago, DarkClown said:

And even more strange: I can set a filling and stroke to the topmost GROUP!

This opens another can of worms and unfixed bugs.

You can assign fill and/ or stroke colors to groups.

Those get applied to all child layers already inside the group which can come handy.

but:

• pixel layers get filled by the color, too. And both fill and/or stroke color will fill pixel layers
• vector layers distinguish fill/stroke correctly
• layers added later to group won’t get impacted

layer fx applied to to group affect all layers inside group, even if add later.

 

[NotMyFault]

Bonus: applying a fill to a group of vector layers (tiles of any shape like rectangles or puzzle pieces) partitions the fill to every member, which stays even when removed from the group and repositioned.

[DarkClown]

3 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

Bonus: applying a fill to a group of vector layers (tiles of any shape like rectangles or puzzle pieces) partitions the fill to every member, which stays even when removed from the group and repositioned.

Great .... something I just ran into ... being even more surprised

[ZhangX]

8 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

This opens another can of worms and unfixed bugs.

You can assign fill and/ or stroke colors to groups.

Those get applied to all child layers already inside the group which can come handy.

but:

• pixel layers get filled by the color, too. And both fill and/or stroke color will fill pixel layers
• vector layers distinguish fill/stroke correctly
• layers added later to group won’t get impacted

layer fx applied to to group affect all layers inside group, even if add later.

 

8 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

Bonus: applying a fill to a group of vector layers (tiles of any shape like rectangles or puzzle pieces) partitions the fill to every member, which stays even when removed from the group and repositioned.

 

I'm really surprised, not by these worm cans (being a backyard shop then bought by a web 8.0 and what not), but by the vast amount of incomprehensible knowledge on these canned worms you guys had. It's almost like one of those pokemon family trees, but with professional vector graphic designer bugs.