Guides and Bounding boxes.

[jackamus]

It has been suggested from another forum member that I post this topic as a 'Features Request'.

I do not have AD v2 but AD v1 so I believe that this request will also be for v2.

There has been a lively discussion today and at various other times over the years regarding why object bounding boxes disappear when either dragging a new guide or moving a current one. I maintain that if the bounding box remained visible then position a guide to snap to the centre handles is easy. However with the handles disappearing it may require changing snapping settings. This is not always satisfactory as it can create snapping problems elsewhere. For example another snapping point somewhere on the work area that is almost coincident with a bounding box midpoint handle may grab the guide.

I am merely asking not to implement some new that that is not current but to simply change the way an existing feature is displayed. How much code needs to be unwritten to do that?

All the suggestions that have been suggested are all workarounds taking more effort to implement when all that is needed is for something not to disappear momentarily.

 

 

 

[Old Bruce]

24 minutes ago, jackamus said:

I maintain that if the bounding box remained visible then position a guide to snap to the centre handles is easy.

It may appear that the guide snaps to the Handle, it doesn't it snaps to the Centre of the object.

[lepr]

34 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

It may appear that the guide snaps to the Handle, it doesn't it snaps to the Centre of the object.

It may appear that the guide snaps to the centre of the object. It doesn't - it snaps to the centre of the Regular Bounds of the object.

[Cracked Pot]

Hi I am new to Affinity Designer. I bought version 1 about a year ago but till now haven't had a chance to start looking at it. I've been using Illustrator CS6 for years but I can't keep limping an old Mac along to avoid Adobe's outrageous subscription fees. I'm struck by the various similarities that Affinity has with Illustrator, though unfortunately it hasn't taken long into working with Affinity for me to to be quite dismayed: Bounding boxes! I hate them! I couldn't stand them in Illustrator and always worked with them turned off. They get in the way and obscure your vision of the work, and affect the accuracy and speed of the workflow. This was true for me in Illustrator, and so I am really disappointed to find that in Affinity they can't be turned off at all. In searching for a way to do this all I have come across is frustration from Affinity users who feel the way I do. 

Please somebody tell me this isn't true? I suspect I am just going to be told to suck it up and learn to work with them, but I'm really hoping that'll not be the case?

Affinity... Please, pretty please, do something?! I promise Adobe will hate you for it!

Thanks,

Signed....   Not very hopeful?

[jackamus]

1 hour ago, Cracked Pot said:

Hi I am new to Affinity Designer. I bought version 1 about a year ago but till now haven't had a chance to start looking at it. I've been using Illustrator CS6 for years but I can't keep limping an old Mac along to avoid Adobe's outrageous subscription fees. I'm struck by the various similarities that Affinity has with Illustrator, though unfortunately it hasn't taken long into working with Affinity for me to to be quite dismayed: Bounding boxes! I hate them! I couldn't stand them in Illustrator and always worked with them turned off. They get in the way and obscure your vision of the work, and affect the accuracy and speed of the workflow. This was true for me in Illustrator, and so I am really disappointed to find that in Affinity they can't be turned off at all. In searching for a way to do this all I have come across is frustration from Affinity users who feel the way I do. 

Please somebody tell me this isn't true? I suspect I am just going to be told to suck it up and learn to work with them, but I'm really hoping that'll not be the case?

Affinity... Please, pretty please, do something?! I promise Adobe will hate you for it!

Thanks,

Signed....   Not very hopeful?

I concur with you not being very hopeful. However unlike you I'm quite happy with bounding boxes except when you try to drag a guide the bounding box handles disappear and that you cannot align the guide with any particular handle. They claim that snapping would cure this but snapping can also be a problem when there may be other snapping positions that are almost in line but out of view and create a false snap.

I have been asking Affinity for years and discussing with forum members at length to keep the bounding box handles visible whilst dragging a guide but to no avail. I fear that Affinity is not interested in listening to my plea and updating the apps to take care of this problem. I've even given examples of how useful this feature would be for producing technical illustrations and its relevance to aligning a guide to the major and minor axes of an ellipse.

All I can suggest is just be persistent, as I have been, in the hope that you will get one of the developers on your side.

[JET_Affinity]

Bounding boxes have thie

On 4/27/2023 at 4:41 PM, Cracked Pot said:

Bounding boxes! I hate them! I couldn't stand them in Illustrator and always worked with them turned off.

As a FreeHand user for the entire life of the program, I certainly relate. Two things FreeHand users despised about Illustrator's interface was the visual clutter of bounding boxes and its insistence upon two separate selection tools. Unfortunately, almost all drawing programs have mimicked both, just because the market 'majority' is too accustomed to the inferior interface of Illustrator.

But bounding boxes do have their uses, and "always' working with them off sacrifices that utility. In that sense, it's parallel to the way many Illustrator users claim to 'never' use the Selection Tool (black pointer) and 'always' use the stupidly named Direct Selection Tool (white pointer).

On 4/27/2023 at 6:47 PM, jackamus said:

I've even given examples of how useful this feature would be for producing technical illustrations

The uses of bounding boxes pertinent to technical drawing are far more than just serving as snap points for guides.

Affinity's bounding boxes are better than, for example, Inkscape's in that they rotate with their content. Inkscape's always reset to normalized to the page, no matter how you transform the selection, which is downright debilitating. By what logic does any illustration program assume that a user only ever wants to scale a selection either vertically or horizontally?

Affinity's bounding boxes are better than Illustrator's. Like Illustrator's, they rotate with their contents. This is invaluable in technical Illustration because the side scale handles remain oriented to their content; for example, they remain oriented to the major and minor diameters of a rotated ellipse, and the measures in the Transform panel reflect those of the major and minor diameters. Like Illustrator's they can be re-normalized to the page. Unlike Illustrator, rotated objects still 'remember' their rotated orientation, and their bounding boxes comply. If you 'reset' a rotated bounding box in Illustrator, its rotated orientation is lost. Unfortunately, Affinity's bounding boxes cannot be permanently reset to page-normal, despite this having been requested for years.

But the main ramification you have to keep in mind about any wish of 'getting rid of' bounding boxes in Affinity is that you loose any tactile on-page transformation tools, because Affinity doesn't provide transform tools in the Toolbox, like both Illustrator and FreeHand always have. You have to transform objects using the ridiculously redundant bounding box handles, which of course most often don't even reside on the objects being transformed. Yes, you can perform transformations numerically in the Transform Panel, but that's not "tactile on-page". So I'm afraid you're stuck with bounding boxes in Affinity.

Being stuck with bounding boxes, they should at least deserve far more thoughtful and powerful implementation than they have. What justifies a ridiculous five rotation handles? Almost as frustrated as my comment about Inkscape, by what logic does any Illustration program assume that a user only ever wants to scale or measure a selection in the directions of its bounding box? Do something new and tremendously useful: Take just one of those absurdly redundant five rotation handles (the lollypop one) and give it the ability to rotate the bounding box about the selection so that its scale handles can then be used to scale the selection in whatever direction needed. And provide an option to permanently reset the selection's 'remembered' orientation to the current orientation of that rotated bounding box. This one simple feature would, so far as I know, be unique in this program segment, and immensely useful for technical drawing (and other drawing types, too).

JET

[jackamus]

This is great post!

I would suggest that user has the choice of being able to toggle between the original horizontal/vertical or the rotated orientation of the bounding boxes.

My only gripe is that when dragging a guide from the side or top to align with a central bounding box handle, the handle disappears which is a real bug when there may be many other almost aligning snapping points out of view.

[lepr]

5 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

Take just one of those absurdly redundant five rotation handles (the lollypop one) and give it the ability to rotate the bounding box about the selection so that its scale handles can then be used to scale the selection in whatever direction needed. And provide an option to permanently reset the selection's 'remembered' orientation to the current orientation of that rotated bounding box. This one simple feature would, so far as I know, be unique in this program segment, and immensely useful for technical drawing (and other drawing types, too).

Great idea and clearly described! Hopefully, that gets implemented.

[jackamus]

Agreed.

[fde101]

9 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

absurdly redundant five rotation handles (the lollypop one)

Some users seem to have difficulty hitting the hot spot for rotation using the corner handles; having the "lollypop" handle makes this very common operation easier to grab in a hurry for users experiencing that difficulty.

It would be nice to have the option to turn it off though, for those of us who don't really need it.

Your suggestion to repurpose it is not a bad one either - perhaps a drop-down list with three settings then:

• Hidden (don't show it at all)
• Rotate object (current behavior)
• Rotate bounding box (your proposed behavior)

 

9 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

you loose any tactile on-page transformation tools, because Affinity doesn't provide transform tools in the Toolbox,

One way around this would be to auto-show the bounding box with its handles when the mouse pointer gets close to it so that you would have them readily available when needed but simply moving the pointer away from it would declutter your view of the working area.

Another would be to hide the bounding box but keep the handles visible.

A third option would be to make the bounding box visible only when using the move tool, or when using the node tool with Transform Mode enabled.

[PaulEC]

10 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

Take just one of those absurdly redundant five rotation handles (the lollypop one)

It is also an obvious indication of the orientation of the object (as it's at the top), which can be useful sometimes!

[deeds]

Transform tools, please:

 

W = Move

E = ScalE

R = Rotate

T = Transform (skews and distorting scales)

 

 

[JET_Affinity]

On 4/30/2023 at 7:47 AM, fde101 said:

Some users seem to have difficulty hitting the hot spot for rotation using the corner handles; having the "lollypop" handle makes this very common operation easier to grab in a hurry for users experiencing that difficulty.

Vector drawing programs have done fine without the silly lollypop since the 80s. 'Difficulty hitting' a handle is usually controlled by a proximity setting in user prefs.

But it's a moot point anyway. I didn't say get rid of the silly lollypop; I said "...give it the ability...." That could be accomplished by means of  a momentary keyboard modifier when dragging it. I said to give that ability to the lollypop because that 'fifth wheel' rotation handle is the one that looks 'special' in the interface. Giving it the ability I desire would actually make it special.

I assume the silly lollypop is for those using their fingers on touch screens. I gave up finger painting when I was 3.

JET