Forcing a new curve or layer to open at the top of the layer list???

[A_B_C]

All of this underscores the need for a simple Deselect All Layers option.

 

I would second that.  :)

 

(Crabtrem, as far as Affinity Photo is concerned, you are perfectly right. But Affinity Photo follows a layer organization approach that is different from the approach of Affinity Designer.)

[crabtrem]

My bad. For some reason I thought we were talking AP.

[MEB]

But I did not manually place any of those objects off the canvas -- all of them were created completely well within the 640 x 640 boundaries of the canvas. I did not change the position of any of them to an off-canvas position with the Move tool, using the Transform panel, or by any other means.

 

Just moving them into the child position of the dark blue "Parent" rectangle in the layers panel by itself moved them off the canvas to what seem to be completely arbitrary new positions.

 

This shouldn't happen in any circumstance. Can you outline the steps you are taking to end up with an object outside the canvas simply moving it in the Layers panel?

I'm having trouble replicating this here.

[R C-R]

Huh? Is that reproducible on your end??

No, of course not. That would be too easy. I can occasionally get a variety of different odd behaviors when I am working with creating children of "layerless" objects, but never the same one twice in a row. I suspect it has something to do with some particular sequence of steps, possibly ones I have done on a document that I closed before opening a new one, but that is just a guess, based on the one thing that (so far) I can usually reproduce: if I select the Insert at the top of the layer button before closing the prior document (possibly only if I don't save it), the button remains enabled until I click it again, as I described in an earlier post.

 

This may involve doing several undos on the new document -- that seems to be one of the things that increases the chances of seeing something unexpected occur, but that alone doesn't seem to be enough to do it.

 

It may not even have anything directly to do with "layerless" objects: one of the oddities I have seen is an empty layer's Transform values not updating immediately after I drag something into it on the Layers panel. When it is empty & selected, all those values are greyed out zeros, & usually they update immediately with the values of the now child object, which I assume is normal.

 

But every so often that doesn't happen -- the values remain greyed out zeros until I either select the now child object after disclosing it or click on some other item in the Layers panel & then click on it again. This does seem to occur more often if there is at least one "layerless" object in the document, but maybe that is just because I have been paying more attention to this while trying to come up with some recipe to get repeatable results.

 

The lack of repeatable results & the huge number of step sequences I would have to try to see if one of them reliably triggers any of this stuff has just about convinced me to give up trying to figure this out & just live with the occasional weirdnesses. For all I know, it is all caused by something peculiar about my system & has nothing to do with the app, or maybe (& quite possibly more likely) I'm just losing what little there is left of my mind & all this is an illusion caused by some errors I keep making that I'm not aware of.

 

If & until I can come up with something repeatable it is probably best to ignore my previous contributions to this thread.

[JimmyJack]

 

It may not even have anything directly to do with "layerless" objects: one of the oddities I have seen is an empty layer's Transform values not updating immediately after I drag something into it on the Layers panel. When it is empty & selected, all those values are greyed out zeros, & usually they update immediately with the values of the now child object, which I assume is normal.

 

But every so often that doesn't happen -- the values remain greyed out zeros until I either select the now child object after disclosing it or click on some other item in the Layers panel & then click on it again. This does seem to occur more often if there is at least one "layerless" object in the document, but maybe that is just because I have been paying more attention to this while trying to come up with some recipe to get repeatable results.

 

 

I think I can shed some like on at least this part of your post:

 

It seems we can move something (object, group, layer) without actually selecting it. 

So what you'e experiencing could be the difference between:

 

With the "thing" to be moved not selected...

A ) click hold drag-n-drop in one motion. (Object remains unselected upon release.)

 

vs

 

B ) click, release then click hold drag-n-drop.

(or, as you said, click on it again after you've done A)

 

Hope that helps :) .