Today's stupid question from a newbie (rotating text)

[MickM]

I have a document (the floorplan of my apartment) that I needed to rotate 90° so I did a select all and rotated left. That worked fine except now all my text is now sideways. Instead of selecting each text item individually and rotating them one by one (it kills me there is no obvious hot-key for that!) I tried selecting a bunch of the text items and doing a rotate, however the rotate behaves as though the group of selected items is being rotated rather than the the individual items get rotated. How can I do this without having to resort to the very time consuming one-by-one approach? In the past, I've used CAD tools where you could apply an ABSANGLE property to text so that the orientation and rotation etc. remain in tact during transforms (because almost zero people like reading text that is backwards or upside-down). 

[thomaso]

With several text frames selected activate the "Transform Objects Separately" icon in the Context Toolbar. For text frames this button is near the right edge of the screen (or off the screen where it gets visible in a fly-out menu by pressing the >> at the right edge).

To get familiar with the interface it is worth to reduce the delay for the Tooltip pop-ups. You can set it in the app Preferences > User interface > Tooltip delay.

[R C-R]

Ha! @thomaso beat me to it.

 

If I understand what you want to do correctly, select all of the text items & with the Move Tool active, enable the Transform Objects Separately option on the Context Toolbar & then rotate the text object with the rotation handle to rotate them back. See https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/pages/ObjectControl/transform.html for a bit more about this.

Note: if your screen is too narrow you may not see that option on the toolbar. If si, it will be an option listed in the popup menu with the >> icon.

[MickM]

Thanks guys! That did the trick. I did scour the menus looking for a way to do this. Perhaps I missed it, but it looks like this is a toolbar-only option. In other software I've used, you can select multiple items and they all remain separate entities (i.e. Transform Objects Separately is the default). If you want to transform them as a group you simply do a group command beforehand, do the transform, and then ungroup. Still getting used to this software after migrating from Canvas...

[MickM]

Hmm - I noticed something I consider to be unexpected behavior - with Transform Objects Separately active, I can no longer option drag to make a copy - that only works with Transform Objects Separately deactivated. Is this a bug?

[thomaso]

11 minutes ago, MickM said:

with Transform Objects Separately active, I can no longer option drag to make a copy - that only works with Transform Objects Separately deactivated.

It works for me (in V1), regardless of the button pressed or not, and with one or more selected objects.

What if you hold cmd instead of opt?

[MickM]

Well this is odd. I've been working further on the document between posts and now it does work! I swear I wasn't dreaming this!

And 1 minute later while trying to figure out what happened it's not working again. Something is misbehaving - definitely. When I noticed it not working I was zoomed in, so I did ⌘0 to zoom out and it worked. I zoomed back in again and it didn't work again, then I did another ⌘0 and it still didn't work. The option-drag (when misbehaving) acts like it's just doing another separate rectangular selection. I'm using version 2.1.1 on a 2019 16" MacBook Pro running Monterey 12.6.7. I can post a video if requested.

[MickM]

Some further info on this - apparently when you select a region of objects with Transform Objects Separately enabled the option-drag only works if started on the one "highlighted" object within the bunch of objects selected. I was starting my option-drag on any of the selected objects (which is what I'm used to doing in other tools and to me is obvious). My previous post indicating the degree of zoom played a part in this is irrelevant. Curiously, after option-dragging a group of items I can subsequently option-drag that cluster starting from any object in the copied cluster without worrying about first locating a specific object (because no one object appears to be specially identified). This doesn't seem very polished to me...

[Wayne Burrows]

I have a follow-up question on this topic @thomaso & @R C-R...

Is there a way to rotate individual texts/characters within a text frame?

For example - Within the word ROTATE, (using the Artistic Text Tool) all I want to do is rotate the letter A. (or perhaps rotate different characters independently) I can't figure out how to get that done.

Any tips for me??

WB

[R C-R]

I don't know of any way to do that without converting to curves, which would make the text uneditable.

Maybe someone else has a better solution?

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

I don't know of any way to do that without converting to curves, which would make the text uneditable.

Maybe someone else has a better solution?

As long as it's Artistic text, and a short string like that, one could use 6 separate Artistic Text objects, and each could be rotated however you want while remaining editable.

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

As long as it's Artistic text, and a short string like that, one could use 6 separate Artistic Text objects, and each could be rotated however you want while remaining editable.

That would work but it might take a lot of fiddling around to get the spacing to look good.

[walt.farrell]

8 minutes ago, R C-R said:

That would work but it might take a lot of fiddling around to get the spacing to look good.

Well, one could also use a single Artistic Text object, and overlay the separate ones to get the spacing, etc. to look better.

[R C-R]

Just now, walt.farrell said:

Well, one could also use a single Artistic Text object, and overlay the separate ones to get the spacing, etc. to look better.

Thus, my 'fiddling around' comment. 

[Return]

Tip:
 

 

 

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, Return said:

Tip:

Still a bit fiddly but a shorter tune. 

[Return]

I'm on top of it 🤣

[Wayne Burrows]

4 hours ago, Return said:

I'm on top of it 🤣

Yeh, just as @R C-R said, 'fiddly'. Lol.

I was hoping that somebody knew something that I didn't, so that I could avoid doing something similar to what your demo demonstrated. 😅

Appreciate the input nevertheless.

WB