Lines in objects showing up obscured by red lines

[Ted H]

That's probably a bad title, but it's the best concise subject I could come up with. 😬

I'm running Affinity Designer 2.2.1 on a Mac Mini M1 under Sonoma 14.0. Hardware acceleration is on.

I'll try to explain this as best as I can and in as much detail as possible, but have also attached screencaps to illustrate the behaviour. Here's the issue: I was drawing a design that contains some normally stroked lines and some dotted lines. When I zoomed out, it looked like my dotted lines were solid stroked lines. When I zoomed in tight, I could see that my dotted lines were indeed dotted lines, but there was another thinner line on top of my existing lines. I did some experiments, and this happens to all lines, not just dotted lines. For instance, I had an object that I had made light pink, but it looked red. I kept lightening the pink, and it didn't appear to get lighter. Turns out this rogue red line was on top of the light pink line, making it look red.

SCREENCAP DESCRIPTIONS: In the attached pictures, the first one shows my document freshly opened. In the second picture, I have clicked on the red dotted line and the two rightmost black dotted lines with the move tool. (Note: I did not shift-click on the lines, I just clicked on one line and then clicked the next line without any modifiers, and the red line stays superimposed on the clicked lines. They stay like this even if I click in an empty part of the document after clicking on each line.) The third picture shows the same as the second picture, but zoomed in so you can see how the thin red line looks.

Now when I hit "Z" to get my zoom tool activated so I could zoom in, I noticed the lines looked like they should again. But when I hit V to select my move tool, the errant red overlay lines appeared. I didn't test ALL the tools, but it appears this behaviour is only happening when I have the move tool selected. It's really offputting and making it hard to edit my document since I can't see the actual lines.

In doing some experiments to prepare to make an accurate report here, I noticed something even odder. Any object I click on in my document gets that errant red line superimposed on it, BUT this only happens for the most recent six items that I have clicked. If I click on a seventh object, the red line on the oldest object I clicked is immediately removed, so at any given time, six items have the errant line on them. UPDATE: actually, while trying this a few times so that I could count how many objects this is affecting at one time, it seems I don't even have to click on the object for that errant red line to show up. Just moving the cursor over the object isn't enough though; if I hover over an object for about a half-second, the errant line appears. Very strange.

I just did another quick test, made a new document and drew seven squares in it, tried clicking each with the move tool as mentioned above, and got the same behaviour: errant red lines on each as long as the move tool was active, and the red line disappeared from the first one as soon as I clicked the seventh square.

This may have been something that has already been noticed and addressed, as I tried reproducing the behaviour in Designer Beta v2.2.1 (2075) and it behaves as expected, with no overlaid red lines. The beta works fine.

[Old Bruce]

Those are Snapping Candidates. Uncheck the box.

[Ted H]

well, colour me embarrassed! I feel like a fool. Thank you for clearing this up and teaching me something new! Apologies for wasting everybody's time. Problem solved, thank you Old Bruce! 🤗